The Tunnel

The first new translation in a century of prophetic international bestseller: a radium-age techno-utopian epic about a monomaniacal engineer’s mission to build a railway tunnel connecting Europe and America.

When it was published in 1913, Bernhard Kellermann’s The Tunnel became one of the most successful novels ever published, in any language. At once a radium-age techno-utopian pulp novel of rip-roaring action and a devastating critique of human ambition, capital, and progress, it tells the story of Mac Allan, an engineer determined to build the world’s first trans-Atlantic train tunnel, from his “futuristic” New York all the way to France.

Kellerman implacably details every aspect of this impossible undertaking: from the raising of funds to the hiring of workers; from the press frenzy to the opposition of the steamship conglomerates. Likewise, as work progresses, The Tunnel portrays the literal descent of conditions underground into a living hell, as the tunnel diggers’ inhuman treatment at the hands of capital threatens to blow up in everyone’s faces.

As celebrated poet and translator Michael Hofmann writes in his introduction, “Reading The Tunnel now, more than a hundred years after its first appearance, we may be astonished to see its astute identification and dramatization of forces and tendencies in society and civilization that we think of as recent and exclusive to us . . . We see our own ecological disasters, the morphing and leaching of money into publicity, publicity into politics, politics into gimmickry, gimmickry into industrial production, and vice versa and every which way.”