‘The Train Was on Time’ by Heinrich Böll ****

Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Train Was on Time, was first published in 1949, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, two years after its translation into English.  Aside from one book of his which I did not much enjoy (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), I was not hugely familiar with Böll’s work.  I chose to reserve a very old hardback, and slightly battered, copy of this book from my local library.  The edition I borrowed had been translated from its original German by Leila Vennewitz.  I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, although I admit the blurb did appeal to me and my more depressing reading tendencies. 

The protagonist of the piece, Private Andreas, is a 24-year-old who finds himself on a train heading from Germany to rejoin his unit in Poland during the Second World War.  On said train, Böll writes: ‘… it is suddenly borne on him that he has very little longer to live.’  On his journey, despite the crippling knowledge that dawns upon him, Andreas is ‘shocked to find that he can still make friends, play cards, sleep, eat and drink…  Most of the time life goes on despite Andreas’ knowledge that he is to die soon.’ 

We first meet Andreas when a chaplain is asking him to board the train; the response he gives is as follows: ‘“Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert…  What’s the hurry?  I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to…  I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible – that I don’t want to die.”’ 

The Train Was on Time is certainly not a cheerful read, but I found immense power in its 110 pages.  Böll’s prose is incredibly visceral: ‘As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly flesh, tissue, cells, nerves…’.  This concept of ‘Soon’ goes on to haunt the remainder of the novella: ‘Soon.  Soon.  Soon.  Soon.  When is Soon?  What a terrible word: Soon.  Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year…  Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot.  Soon is everything.’ 

Andreas becomes more and more convinced that his time on earth is nigh: ‘Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over.  I shan’t ever know peacetime again.  No more peacetime.  There’ll be no more of anything, no music…  no flowers…  no poetry…  no more human joy…’. 

The Train Was on Time really probes its protagonist; against the context of a real conflict, it describes the internal conflict he is constantly experiencing, too.  This is such a powerful topic, particularly to explore in the brief space of a novella.  I found Böll’s character study fascinating from the outset, and liked the author’s approach of a continual narrative, which has the odd paragraph break but no chapters as such.  The omniscient perspective, with flashes of our protagonist’s thoughts, was a really satisfying approach.  The novella feels momentous; it propels its readers forward at speed, and has an unmistakeable intensity to it.  The story is a little peculiar at times, but overall, I found it quite moving.  I would not describe The Train Was on Time as an easy read by any means, but it is a story that I believe will stay with me for a long time to come.