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Amazon.co.uk Review
Itinerant philosopher Christopher Ross' debut book Tunnel Visions--a deftly observant sideways glance at human nature when in transit or, more often, not--sprung from 16 months working as a Station Assistant for London Underground. Or Platform 6, northbound Victoria Line, at Oxford Circus station, to be precise. A series of notes from the Underground, it provides a placatory centre of calm and rationale in our increasingly eddying lives as Ross, previously a corporate lawyer, oriental carpet smuggler and Japanese soap actor, takes the McJob to find a personal space in which to ruminate. After the surreal procedures of the training school, he is allocated his own patch, of which he grows quickly proprietorial. In a collection of precise tableaux, he neither leans upon nor ignores the inevitable anecdotal luggage that accumulates, but relates it with philosophical detachment and, when necessary, an engaged moral probity. He observes the archetypal gaits of his commuters, sings harmonies with a busking act, witnesses the spit and polish applied for a visit by John Prescott, and a man emerge from a train tunnel after being told at the previous station that it would be quicker to walk. Green grapes, he learns, are more deadly than banana skins, though not as lethal as suicidal "one-unders" (or "track pizza", in unforgiving New York parlance). A captured mosquito turns out to be unknown in Britain, an ugly, beswaddled baby turns out to be a monkey, and a dog on a lead a domesticated fox. Nothing is what it seems, but only if you look.
Like the best travel literature, Tunnel Visions chooses internal rather than external landscapes, and describes them with a steady calm eye. From the autopilot of the Victoria Line trains to the sheep-like, but never sheepish, autopilot of his gaggles of passengers, the wisdom, and man-hours, Ross invests in this woefully under-resourced utility rewards with the best view from the other side of the Tube tracks since John Wain's novel The Smaller Sky, now sadly out-of-print. In the end the pessimism ground Ross down, but the Oxford Circus' loss was literature's gain, with this terrific, humane, utterly original legacy.--David Vincent
Review
After ten years spent travelling around the world, Christopher Ross came back to England and decided to get a job which was sufficiently menial that he could think and observe at the same time, while avoiding the danger of being taken over by a corporate mindset. Soon he was a station assistant at Oxford Circus station on the London Underground. While checking the safety equipment, announcing delays and calming furious commuters his mind was engaged on matters such as the nature of truth, the possibility of choice and the different types of breakfast available around the world. Written in a series of short interlinked chapters, this is the record of Ross's outer and inner life during his time at 'Oxo'. He writes plainly but vividly, and has a talent for creating memorable images: the suicide on the tracks, and the station supervisor inching forward with his hands in front of his face to look down at the body; the pauper in Bombay to whom he gives a lit sparkler on the way to a New Year's Eve party: 'I turned and looked back. The crippled street beggar was spinning around and around on his skateboard, laughing madly and tracing infinity signs in phosphorescent white light against the black of the last night of the year.' He moves smoothly between the events on the Underground and the wide-ranging thoughts they inspire in him; from delays on the line to the subjectivity of time, from the station assistants' uniforms to the discrepancy between appearance and self. His real interest is the nature of intellectual freedom, and the possibility of attaining it. The highly regimented Underground system is the ideal setting for his meditations, as he watches its thousands of passengers hurrying down their accustomed routes, roused from their emptiness of mind only when incited to fury and bewilderment at the news that their usual passage to the Central Line is flooded, and they will have to take an alternative route. His observations are by no means always original, but his clarity of mind and perpetual self-questioning ensure that they are never banal, and many will remain with you long after you have finished reading. Surprising, entertaining and stimulating, this book will make you take a fresh look at the world around you. (Kirkus UK)
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