Book review: The Baghdad Railway Club by Andrew Martin

By IAN CAMPBELL
Published on 30/06/2012 00:00

JIM Stringer is on the move again. Andrew Martin’s successful railwayman – a bluff Yorkshireman whose life is the railway and his Missus – finds himself on the railways of Mesopotamia in the summer of 1917 and in a string of adventures,

misunderstandings, misrecognitions, culminating with a dangerously close brush with death in the closing months of the First World War as he returns to England and his family roots.

Martin keeps up the point of view which has made the Jim Stringer books original and which gives him a puzzled and slightly wary take on the world outside his original experience, social class, and willingness to base everything round the railway – and not just the railway, but his railway and York Station, the centre of the world. With this book the action shifts to the Middle East, and Martin cleverly peppers his book with locations which can easily be name-checked in 2012: Basrah, Felluja, Baghdad. It’s all a bit bizarre to honest Jim, who touches the world of the officers without ever penetrating it, and finds himself driving a German-built loco across the desert, attacked by tribesmen, stumbling on bodies, losing his way in exotic bazaars, but always clinging to his common sense.

This is the most wide-ranging plot so far in the series, and there are times when it slips from focus. In then end, though, Martin ties up the strands, and the take on the experience of the British soldier in the Middle East from Jim’s point of view is original and interesting, a world of batmen and officers’ messes seen from just outside, of fear of betrayal and of death.

The Baghdad Railway Club moves, like Jim, at a smart pace and delivers him safely back to his comfort zone at the end.