The Forty-Year Passenger: discussion questions for book clubs

About this guide

The book is about 56,000 words in thirty chapters, and it is an argument as much as a story: between a woman who spent four hundred and eleven strangers to answer a question, a woman who spends herself to get strangers off, and a man who has never spent anything and has been ashamed of it for fifteen years. It helps to assign those three positions to three people before the session and have each defend theirs.

Groups who have read The Memory Fare will want to compare the two books' endings directly; groups who have not will still be able to follow everything, since Abel explains what he needs to.

The questions

1. The book opens with Abel giving away fifteen years of work and admitting the map had been a way of behaving as though he were doing something. What else in the book is a project standing in for a life? Does the book think that is always a bad thing?
2. Peter has lost everything but is not diminished in the way people expect: funny, opinionated, delighted every morning. How does the book's portrait of a man with no yesterday compare to other fiction about memory loss you have read?
3. Abel is told, correctly, that he is not a searcher but a man who writes things down. Is that a lesser thing? How does the book's valuation of it change by the end?
4. Verity Sloane never lied to anyone about the terms, kept a record of every one, and says that is a specification, not a defence. Marta says she does not care what the train is. Whose side were you on at the end of the proposal scene? Did it hold?
5. Sloane spent Peter, and also had five months of him that Abel never had, and gives him back to Abel in a notebook. What does the book want you to feel about a harm that is also the only surviving record?
6. Lumi says of Sloane: It isn't that it worked. It's that it was the only thing you had that was yours. Sloane accepts it as a better sentence than any of hers. Discuss the book's view of work as a substitute for love, and whether it lets anyone off.
7. Peter found his mother, in the eleventh, watching a bucket go past a window, with the last of himself. Abel counted people for fifteen years and never looked at her. What is the book saying about attention, and about the difference between counting and looking?
8. Abel sings to his mother and brother and it is the best hour of his life, and by morning neither will have it. Is it still the best hour? Where does the book put the value of an experience nobody retains?
9. Marta chooses to sit with her sister four times in nine years so that she can get forty-one strangers off. Abel chooses tea every morning for fifteen years and gets nobody off. The book says it is the same arithmetic, and neither gets to know which was right. Do you agree it is the same?
10. Standing in the eleven feet, Sloane learns she was baited aboard by a mark left for a woman like her. Does this change her culpability? Does she think it does?
11. Sloane's name has been black since 1981; she could have left any morning. She calls this incompetence rather than tragedy and forbids anyone to call it otherwise. Which is it?
12. The wall rejects Sloane's working memory of Marion and accepts the two moments when Marion treated her as a person. What does that say about what the book means by love? Is it a generous or a severe definition?
13. Abel kneels in front of his brother's name with three memories and a pen, and does not use them. He then discovers that the right decision feels exactly like cowardice from the inside. Was it the right decision? Would you have been able to tell?
14. Sloane, dying, asks to do the tea round for the man she emptied. Marta calls her the worst person she has ever heard of and would be sorry if she died. Hollis asks who is doing the tea. How does the book get from four hundred and eleven to a rota of eleven hundred, and is the rota an answer or a consolation?
15. Eilish Devane gets her husband's name after thirty years and feels nothing, insists that be written down, and goes to mend his jacket anyway. What is the book's final position on whether it is worth finding someone who cannot know you?
16. The last page is a woman who does not know her sons, singing a verse she invented sixty years ago. Sloane said the memories that stay are the ones that are only the person. Is that an ending of loss or of survival? Did the group agree?

If you have time for one more

Read the two numbers Sloane dictated and Abel's paragraph underneath (chapter thirty), and ask each person which of them they would have written. Then ask whether Abel's addition is a correction of Sloane's record or a completion of it, because the book clearly thinks the difference is the whole point.