On July 6, 2023, it’ll have been a full decade since the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) train carrying volatile crude derailed, caught fire and exploded, taking half of the town of Lac-Mégantic with it, along with 47 people. There’s been no justice for the victims of this accident, beyond the concerted, steadfast journalism of citizens like Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny.
A Train in the Night: The Tragedy of Lac-Mégantic is a book which shouldn’t need to exist. Those victims, as our contributor Alain Deneault so aptly put it, were the casualties of a disaster born of preventable neglect. The trains used by MMA to get Bakken crude from North Dakota to Saint-John, NB’s Irving Oil refinery were in disrepair, undermanned and ill-suited to the task.
The Canadian federal government of the day, led by the devastating policy mandates of the Stephen Harper Conservatives, saw fit to undercut the government’s own jurisdiction at every turn. A private corporation like MMA left to inspect itself as it operates across several Canadian provinces. Someone’s town was going to blow up, at some point. It could have been anyone’s.
The journey of Saint-Cerny’s books on the Lac-Mégantic disaster are themselves a years-long process of dogged journalism and attempts to relate the truth of what happened. First published in French by Les Éditions Écosociété in 2018, Mégantic recounted the disaster and the attempts by the responsible parties to cover-up the incident afterwards and find their tragic scapegoat.
The folks at Talonbooks published W. Donald Wilson’s translation of Saint-Cerny’s work in 2020 as Mégantic: A Deadly Mix of Oil, Rail, and Avarice. In a decision I can only laud as utterly brilliant, Saint-Cerny condensed her work into non-fiction graphic novel form with Mégantic: Un train dans la nuit in 2021 with Les Éditions Écosociété, illustrated by Christian Quesnel.
This book has also seen its own translation, this time published by Between the Lines just this past year. (The publisher was kind enough to send over a review copy.) A Train in the Night sees Wilson also translating the text from the French original, which I have not read for myself – though I intend to acquire both books in the near future. I’m only reviewing the translation.
I first read A Train in the Night in a single sitting from my desk during a break from my day job, and – more or less as I expected – it shattered my heart. I’d remembered the news reports from 2013 about the train explosion – some tripe on CTV News or the like no doubt – but I hadn’t felt the tragedy of these lives being erased in an instant, nor the trauma experienced by the survivors.
Boy howdy, Quesnel’s illustrations keep those emotions front and centre from the opening page. The dense, skillfully crafted sentences in Mégantic – on the black ink and bare white pages of a traditional book product – just can’t compete with the blue toned, wispy remnant of a dead victim’s plea for justice to the living. To punish the guilty. Asking “so … we die for nothing?”
The answer – “No, not for nothing, our hearts beat in the breast of those who save lives” – feels both heroically stoic and utterly, utterly inadequate. I want justice. I want the guilty to pay for their crimes. Not the poor train operator who was put on trial as a convenient scapegoat: no, that man is a victim, too. I’m not piling on to that man’s unimaginable pain and shame, they may say.
Out today! A Train in the Night: The Tragedy of Lac-Mégantic by Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny and Christian Quesnel, translated by W. Donald Wilson: “a political call to action” “a spectacular contribution to Canadian history, Indigenous history, and eco-history”https://t.co/PgJ71Zm8pP pic.twitter.com/ywf4WlJWBZ
— Between the Lines (@readBTLbooks) November 1, 2022
There’s been no real reckoning for CP and MMA’s shareholders, the federal cabinet ministers, and for the Irving Oil owners who bought the crude for their refinery. They should be made to stop. They should have helped the victims of their neglect heal from the tragedy, paid them reparations, and helped them rebuild the town. Left the oil in the ground in North Dakota.
Even if the trains with the Bakken crude – fracked out of North Dakota from lands the Americans stole from the Indigenous peoples who lived (and still live) there – were diverted from passing near towns like Lac-Mégantic, they’re still sending that damned crude into Saint John. Nothing meaningful has changed, and the taste of that realisation inspires despair. I refute such fatalism.
That pinch of combativeness I have in my own body, Saint-Cerny must possess by the gallon. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to research Mégantic and to insist on getting the story out there to both francophone and anglophone Canada and the world. There’s no advantage to doing that: just the toll of seeking justice from a system that would rather carry on as things are.
A Train in the Night is a superbly produced book from all facets. A good spine, excellent glossy paper, a classic graphic novel font that’s emphatic and perfectly legible. The illustrations impact just that perfect hint of characterization: where the facts are given context. From the first moment someone appears on the page, you know if they’re a perpetrator of the disaster or a victim.
I can’t imagine the agony of reducing thousands of words from a dense book of non-fiction into the handful of words used in each cell to describe the context and events leading up to and in the aftermath of the train explosion. There’s so much truth the feds sought to obscure, so much nonsense the national media covered and so much they left unexplored. What to choose!?
Not having fully read through the source book for A Train in the Night (and, again, I need to read the French original, as well) I can only assess the picture which the graphic novel provides by itself. It feels complete. And it places the emphasis on not only the explosion, but also what happened afterwards. The second half of the book opens with two white, black pages, save for:
“The Second Heartbreak.” Of course it wasn’t enough that corporate greed and government neglect cost the victims their lives and the survivors their innocence. Because those forces then swooped in to cover the whole thing up. To deny the victims their justice and the survivors their closure from trauma. They just put up tape and closed the wound with concrete and bulldozers.
I sat there, mouth agape and the book on my desk with those words. “The Second Heartbreak.” From the prior page is the last portion of the main first section, representing a man with his head in his hands from the pain and the shame of the events. I just sat there, glimpsing an ounce of the “atomic bomb” of pain these survivors felt then, likely still feel to this day. I couldn’t breathe.
Once I’d started breathing again, what I felt was the anger, and from that anger, a desire that I needed to be better. These people can’t have died for nothing. And, with the powers that be as my witnesses, I can’t sit in the safe comfort of my home, idle any longer. Too many others suffering fates far, far worse than mine are fighting for justice. We can’t carry on like this.
A Train in the Night is a book I wish we didn’t need. But we do. I did. So do me a favour, if you have the means, grab a copy from Between the Lines. Help this thing hit critical mass. Have a book club around it. You can find A Train in the Night through your local bookstore, online or from the publisher. Start conversations, especially with the tragic 10-year-anniversary coming up.
It’s also worth grabbing the volumes from Talonbooks and the French originals from Éditions Écosociété, too. Support the writers and artists who made this truth known to all. We can’t, as the dedication to Mégantic puts it, carry on with letting “many … perish so that a few may be rich.” We’re complicit in the calamities of tomorrow if we fail to do something about them, today.
Dani Godbout is a member of the NB Media Co-op editorial board.
