Review of The Girl at the Tram Stop

by Johnson H. Johnson

This article was written as a contribution to the Soaring Twenties (STSC) Symposium. This month’s Symposium theme is “fiction.” The STSC is a group of creatives who write, paint, versify and experiment their way through life. Join us!

For a debut novel, the title is not exactly enticing. Apart from the fact that “The girl…” format has been done to death, it sounds rather mundane, to put it mildly.

From that point of view, a superficial reading of the text suggests that the author has been brutally honest, because almost nothing happens. The plot, if that is not stretching the word beyond its capabilities, is as follows. A girl – we never discover her name – appears at the tram stop every morning at 08:11, where she waits for the B12 to arrive at 08:18. She stands there while people enter or exit the tram but does not get on it herself. When someone speaks to her, she answers them, but never initiates the conversation herself.

Thus, on the surface, this would seem to be nothing more or less than an example of performance art presented as literature. However, there is much more to it than that because Johnson has introduced elements of randomisation, thereby rendering this volume as several stories in one.

The book comes with two dice, one red, the other blue. At the end of some chapters there is an instruction in the form of, say, R3 or B4,2 or R,2,2 or R-rand or B-rand. The letters R and B refer to the colour of the die to be thrown or the direction in which the reader is enjoined to travel. For example, R3 means leap forward three chapters, while B4,2 instructs the reader to go back 4 chapters and read only the second paragraph, followed by the second paragraph of the next chapter, and so on. An instruction such as R-rand indicates that the reader should throw the red die and then leap forward by the number of chapters indicated.

In addition, Johnson has inserted what he asserts is the golden key. By solving particular clues in the text, the reader can unlock an instruction that will reveal, hidden in plain sight, Johnson’s seminal unpublished treatise called The Borgesian Imperative: Escaping the Labyrinth. Obviously, the title itself has been omitted to prevent “cheating”.

In a recent interview, Johnson stated that he was very much influenced by Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. As you may know, the structure of ‘Life’ is based on the knight’s move in chess. In response, Johnson’s book is inspired by the game Snakes and Ladders.

There is no doubt that the book is clever. Some might say it is too clever. But the key question, surely, is: does the effort required to decode the book justify itself? In other words, is it enjoyable to read?

The answer is that it depends on which story or stories you actually read: some are better than others. Because of the built-in randomisation, there are 973,469,712,824,056 possible variations. If one can read a story in an hour, reading all of these stories would take one hundred eleven billion, ninety-one million, nine hundred fifty-four thousand, five hundred twenty years, assuming you keep at it twenty-four hours a day with no breaks for eating or sleeping. In other words, it would take longer than the age of the universe. Well, you can’t say the book isn’t value for money!

Notes

I am sorry to have to tell you, but this book does not exist, and therefore this review is fictional. This was hinted at by a kind of Easter egg in the form of the mention of The Borgesian Imperative. Borges often wrote reviews or accounts of books which didn’t exist. As for the variations, this was inspired by Queneau’s 100,000 Billion Poems, which you can read about in this article. The name Queneau was also hinted at in the same ‘Easter egg’. He was the co-founder of the Oulipo movement, which advocates inventing and applying constraints (such as avoiding the use of a particular letter). He famously declared that “Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they then try to escape.” The randomisation aspect was inspired by Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, about a character who determines every course of action by the throw of a die.

I hope you have enjoyed this little escape into fantasy!

The book cover was created by Ideogram, and the second picture was generated by See Art. For details of these and other useful AI programs, please see 9 incredibly useful AI resources.