Order THE FACTORY LINE here
(other books reviewed)
Order LOW DOWN here
Order A TEENAGE SUICIDE here
Suicide wasn't my style. Revolutions were dead, so I sat and I drank to forget I was still here.
In today's world, you need to be careful about dead end jobs as much as you need to be careful about bad seafood or someone spiking your drink, molesting you and cloning your credit card. It could happen to you in the blink of an eye. It happened to me, not so long ago. They are the sneakiest ill of modern times, because you cannot really understand that it's an issue unless it happens to you. Ian Truman knows what I'm talking about. His novella THE FACTORY LINE is about the sweetest, funniest and honest account of a day in the life of people with no future.
The idea is simple. Ian starts his shift at 6:59 AM and leaves the factory about 15 hours later and ends his day in the red light district of Montreal. There are a lot of things and a lot of people going through his shift. Co-workers with a degree, going insane trying to figure their way out of the factory. Co-workers without a degree, dreaming of an abstraction better than this place. Older workers who have abandoned the idea of a future and are trying to make their present moment as flavorful as it can possibly get. Many things can happen in one day at the shopping cart assembly line and very little of it has to do with assembling shopping carts.
To highlight the struggled of overworking oneself for no cause whatsoever, Ian Truman took an interesting decision: making his novella the depiction of one long and crazy day at work. That is a realism technique in itself, because the short time frame limits the amount of time the narrator Ian spends in his minds and focuses the story on what happens that day. All the boredom, the frustration and the anxiety at seeing life pass oneself by are put into daily interactions. This way, mundane actions and water cooler banter become loaded with an underlying energy and an emotion that becomes difficult to ignore. Truman understands and applies the realism dogma that nothing is ever said or done without a underlying reasons.
That's when my heart would give out. See, the heart always figured it out before the brains did. The brain would want to keep going and going like there was a purpose or a grander picture, but the heart; the heart just knew better.
Another nice surprise to THE FACTORY LINE was the satire. Ian Truman usually writes from an angry place, but in this particular book, the anger is controlled and focused into one powerful blast of satire. Truman is not overdoing it. He's not looking for his characters to become walking symbols, but instead are larger, crazier pariodies of who they are. Because that's how work is, when you don't bring it home. You become another person than who you really are. You make a spectacle out of yourself to kill some time and make friends. The satire in THE FACTORY LINE shows precision and a keen understanding of the dynamics of dead end jobs.
Satire is supposed to carry a number of feelings with it that are not humor: sadness, anxiety, boredom, fear...THE FACTORY LINE carries all that and some more. I'm not sure how much you need to have been through the meaningless grind to get it, but I got THE FACTORY LINE right in the face. The loss of meaning is an issue in an age where meaning took over survival in everyday life and it's the type of issues Ian Truman is dealing with in his fiction. I enjoyed all his fiction so far, but THE FACTORY LINE had a particular, satisfying burn to it, like an aged whiskey, found inside an abandoned house.
