All the same characters are aboard, although one of them is dead Van Horne has insisted that his funeral wagon should be pulled behind the locomotive, filled with his treasures, a tempting target for any thief. Next the action skips ahead three years to the Boundless’s maiden journey. In a first chapter written with breathless pace and tension, Oppel introduces Will Everett, a kid with ambitions to be an artist his father, an engineer on the line the gorgeous Maren, a teenage trickster the dastardly Brogan, a ruthless crook and Cornelius van Horne, the moneybags behind the train and its line. It’s a wonderful symbol of the pioneer spirit, ploughing through the Canadian landscape, packed with all the chancers, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who will build this new society, from the strutting successes to the freshest arrivals, “humbly dressed passengers carrying odd, tattered suitcases and sagging boxes and bundled crying babies”. T he hero of Kenneth Oppel’s thrilling new novel is a train, the Boundless, seven miles long, composed of almost a thousand carriages, built to cross Canada from west to east at the end of the 19th century.
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