Central Station Is About the People Living in the Shadow of a Science-Fictional World

The Sprawl was tactile and imaginary, both surface sheen and something deeper, more eldritch, running with all manner of rough beasts. Reading Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station invokes a kindred place for me—a place I want to walk and feel—but it’s that much farther down the road, that much older, a place that lingers in regret and waits, expectant. There’s a kind of science fiction that keys on places, and Central Station is one of those, bringing to life an entire city in the rough sketches of its impossible and impressive people.
The edifice of the title rises above Tel Aviv, a conduit to the stars. It is a huge structure, built over generations, and casts its shadow, both literal and figurative, on the people and the neighborhoods below. Jaffa has long been a port city, and now the port spikes upward, off the crust of the earth. There’s something wistful about the places beneath Central Station: cyborg soldiers left over from the last war beg for scraps; there is a man called The Lord of Discarded Things; a data vampire stows away away, then sneaks off into the crush of Tel Aviv. This is a left-behind place full of left-behind people. This is a place Bobby Newmark couldn’t even imagine, young as he was, though he may have passed through it on his way to getting old.
Every Friday before Shabbat, Mama Jones brings her boy Kranki to Central Station so he can watch for his father’s return from the far-flung solar system. This is a worn indulgence for her, something acquiesced to for a child she loves. Kranki doesn’t exactly have a father. He isn’t exactly her son, or the son of Boris Chong, who does come home to Tel Aviv via Central Station at the beginning of the novel. Kranki is something engineered, a lark of Chong’s when he was young and building people, when he was in love with Mama Jones. Chong is home to see to his dying father; Mama Jones is running out the clock; Kranki and his street siblings are something no one expects. And everywhere is the Conversation: the voices of millions in a song of sorts, or social media expanded and contracted into something like a river and an ocean, a particle and a wave.

This is the second of Tidhar’s novels I’ve read in as many months, and I have to say, I’m incredibly impressed with his range of style and voice. A Man Lies Dreaming was pulp snarl, a book both thoughtful and lewd, nasty and pointed. But Central Station, now this is something different: amiable, shifting, slow, and stealthy. There’s nothing particularly urgent about it, no main arc that drives you from here to there. This is not to say there aren’t stakes for the people who live in the shadow of the station. This Tel Aviv is a vibrant, textured place. Tidhar has the knack of detailing his beautiful, worn city with the specificity of pop songs and cultural detritus only known to its people, the kind of tossed off knowledge that cements a people to a place, and is ultimately unknowable to outsiders.
He had me leaning in, listening, to this conversation. You should take a listen too, on your way from here to there.
Central Station is available now.