Baltimore native Michael Flanagan's "Stations" is a reverent and witty homage to the railroads and steam engines that once crossed the American landscape. All in one, it is an art book, a work of fiction and a historical re-creation and collage. Above all, it is an ingenious and intricate trompe l'oeil -- an artistic deception.
At the heart of "Stations," Mr. Flanagan has created a document -- a photograph album -- and then altered it so that it appears to be the work of multiple authors. The result is a filtered, layered glimpse into the past -- page after page of melancholy, homely, yet beautiful images. To introduce the album, Mr. Flanagan has invented a phlegmatic and stolid narrator, Lucius Caton, an apple and dairy farmer and one-time journalist.
The album is purported to be the work of Russell McKay, Lucius' second cousin. A lifelong train enthusiast and photographer, Russell took pictures of about-to-be-outmoded steam engines when he was a teen-ager in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, he persuaded officials of two privately owned railroad freight lines in the Shenandoah Valley of northwest Virginia -- the 30-mile-long Powhatan and the 57-mile-long Buffalo and Shenandoah -- to commission him to record every station.
Russell, Lucius tells us, was attracted to railroads "in a genteel state of decay." Russell's aesthetics are revealed in this description from his diary: "Graceful truss bridges, a network of rusty rails, faded lettering on the walls of old brick factories, signal towers, rural crossings, vine-covered telegraph poles, stone culverts, coal piles . . . the trackside milieu is a secret universe, preserved outside of time. Railroad space creates its own kind of outlaw landscape composed of fringe neighborhoods, flourishing along the unheeded routes where nature, never quite extinguished, comes creeping back into town." These images are recorded in Russell's lonely photographs, where very few people make an appearance: a workman in a quarry, a woman in a yard, and Virgil Ross, a model-train builder whom Russell idolized.
In 1982, while working as a brakeman on the Baltimore and Ohio line, Russell perished in a train accident. Only a few copies of his album have survived. The one in Lucius' possession belonged to his older sister Anna, a reclusive and eccentric artist who was Russell's lover. Lucius and Anna are estranged as a result of his meddling criticism of her life. Her singular, bohemian ways continue to exasperate and attract him. Years after Russell's death, Lucius pesters her for the album until, in 1992, she concocts a treasure hunt for him to find it.
He succeeds, but what he gets shocks him. The album has been taken apart and rebound in a rough homemade binding. Its pages have been creased and torn; they bear smudges and stains. In addition, Anna has hand-colored the black-and-white photographs and in a fine script added commentary in the
margins. A professor of landscape history to whom Lucius shows the album observes: "The weathered pages have acquired a convincing presence of their own, as if a whole century's worth of deterioration had managed to be compressed into one decade by means of some arcane but carefully followed prescription."
Anna's hand-colored photographs are in fact wonderfully detailed paintings by Mr. Flanagan, and the weathering of the pages -- the creases, tears, smudges and stains -- is his artistic creation. Similarly, Mr. Flanagan has invented Anna's marginalia -- a text consisting of quotations from historical journals, commemorative road markers and excerpts from her diaries.
Since Anna had accompanied Russell on many of his photography expeditions, the album is also a record of their love affair. To Anna's commentary, Lucius has added his own, which consists of recollections of Russell and Anna, family history and genealogy, and further information about the railroad stations depicted in the album. The love affair between Russell and Anna fascinates Lucius but continues to elude him, for he seems incapable of truly understanding them. He still bears a wounded sense of having been excluded by them, which in part accounts for his scorn of their impecunious ways. One wonders why Mr. Flanagan has selected such an essentially dull narrator, lacking in insight and sensitivity, for his story.
Yet the characters take second place to the images -- a heightened reality, minutely depicted, exquisitely rendered. Mr. Flanagan's railroads convey the same "mystery and melancholy
of the street" that inspired the Paris surrealists of the 1920s and '30s. His quest also evokes Proust, who furnished the book's epigraph: "The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." Although Mr. Flanagan's Shenandoah Valley resembles the actual one, it is nevertheless an invented geography, with imaginary historical markers commemorating its bloody Civil War past.
Because of its small size, this is an intimate book, rather than a tome for the coffee table. Mr. Flanagan is a consummate artist, and "Stations" is a meticulously constructed illusion that will delight and absorb readers.
Ms. Whitehouse is a writer who lives in New York.
Title: "Stations: An Imagined Journey"
Author: Michael Flanagan
Publisher: Pantheon
Length, price: 104 pages, $21