Showing Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher by Christopher Ross

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