A Game of Endless Halves

NOT SO MUCH PRIDE, MORE PERSEVERANCE by M.R. Cosby

“He had the feeling their route was being chosen at random. He could contain himself no longer.” 

Despite any misgivings, as an old man myself testing the end of time, I simply loved with intense anxiety and suspense this seemingly endless work, becoming a man called by a name different from my own; so endless, it is tantamount to a “half-on-half” Zeno’s Paradox, ever waiting for the next half! I truly think this story should be more famous than it is; it took me on an attritional journey, turning each page, expecting it to end, and I now wonder whether it ever did end! A journey echoing the deceptive Sydney trains in the previous story, never seeming to reach where the destination was meant to be, disturbingly beset by football fans with overlong scarves, meeting a bus driver on a new route when the replacement bus took over and a postman on a new mailing walk when directions were needed to the doctor who was going to cure my ills, not forgetting the impossible mobile phone and the incessant paranoia, the earlier train being a double-decker train echoing my own dual identity, and if I ever tell you any more it would spoil it all. ‘Testing times’, in more ways than one. Proud of my perseverance. This work is a naively random taunting of the reader who likes such plain suspenseful narration, or a genuine mind-stirring classic never to be left unexperienced by the deep-thinking? Defiantly both these things. Which makes it all rather special; I can contain my enthusiasm no longer, as I once think I said before… Crowded along by a crowd of which I am part. Almost a stadium disaster of a crowd’s impetus?

“…the crook of his elbow,…”

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Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/03/06/the-trains-dont-stop-here-m-r-cosby/