THERE’S something of the Marcus Aurelius about this work. Like the ‘Meditations’ of one of the few ‘good’ Roman emperors, Will Ashon’s curious book The Passengers is a collection of pithy stoic wisdoms, not from a philosopher-king however, but from ordinary men and women, just like you and I.

When you first crack this book open, it appears as if you’re reading a kaleidoscope of short – sometimes extremely short – first person accounts of individual lives, which, when taken together, build a portrait of Britain, right here, right now, in the 2020s.

For that alone, the work is socially significant. All life is here: rich, poor, refugees, the unemployed, Prosecco Queens, workaholics, the abused, the alienated, the happy, the sad, the content, the bewildered, the addict, the revolutionary, black, white, young, old, the obsessive, the carefree, the godless, the believer, the broken and the healed.

This is ‘us’. This is the land we live in, and the people in it.

However, by the time you finish Ashon’s remarkable documentation of what makes Britain Britain, you realise it isn’t a kaleidoscope through which to view the topography of the moral, social and psychological landscape we inhabit, but in fact a work of philosophy: a handbook, almost, for how to live and how not to live your life in this disjointed and disconnected era. This – whether intentional or not – elevates the book beyond the interesting and curious into the realm of important and necessary.

The Passengers reminds me of The Pensées by Abbé Fausse-Maigre, the fictional work of philosophy which Flora Poste – the mock-heroic lead in Stella Gibbon’s comic masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm – consults if she’s a little down in the dumps. When Flora, perhaps the most organised and throughly level-headed young woman in literature, needs to regain some essential balance in her life she turns to the Pensées (which in itself is a spoof of Blaise Pascal’s real-life Pensées from the 1600s).

Maybe there’s a lie you once told that still troubles you years later, well skip to entry number 59 in The Passengers for the story of Sir Timothy Tin Ribs, and you’ll surely not feel too bad about yourself. Struggling to come to terms with the monumental madness of the news agenda? Turn to entry number 90, for some solace in the knowledge that others are suffering from future-shock just like you and feel they’re living through the montage section of an apocalypse movie.

The way Ashon chose to research and construct The Passengers is worthy of discussion itself - in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was already a podcast in the offing which tells the story of how he assembled this work.

Between October 2018 and March 2021 – a period which significantly dovetails life before and during pandemic, thereby giving social historians some handy comparisons – Ashon “collected voices”. He sent letters to random addresses, hitchhiked and interviewed his drivers (quite dangerous, but writers must be daring sometimes), drew lines on the map and then contacted people who lived at those points. He spoke to folk in person, online and over the phone. He asked his interviewees to tell him a secret, a story from their lives, their dreams, their fears, hopes, loves and guilts. The book is like the people of Britain singing to you from their heart in unison.

Yet if there’s a flaw in the work, it lies here. There’s no introduction from Ashon to the book, explaining this process. The explanation comes hidden in the flyleaf. That’s really not good enough for such a remarkable little treasure. If the publicity team handling the book hadn’t told me how Ashon compiled this work, I’d have been lost right from the start. It simply begins – baldly – with Entry One. Perhaps bookshop customers won’t even buy it, as the back-cover fails to explain Ashon’s purpose or the ingenuity employed to pull off this wonderful achievement. The work needs context and it doesn’t have it.

This aside, the book is elegantly shaped like an epic poem. Each entry – there’s 180 – features one individual voice. Entry One is a single sentence. It reads – heartbreakingly, arrestingly: “I want to stay and stay and never go.” Who doesn’t, in this life?

The second entry is a little longer, the third longer still, all the way until the middle entries, the voices numbered from around 80 or so, which run to three or four pages. Aphorisms and personal philosophies slowly develop entry by entry into full-blown mini stories. Then, just as the entries grew in size until they reached the middle, they decline again until they reach the end. So full-blown stories reduce until they once more become aphorisms and short summaries of personal philosophies. Entry 177, for example, reads – again with a plangency that pulls at the heart: “It didn’t come out great but it tasted good. That’s what’s important.” If that’s not the best summary of the human condition then I don’t know what is. I won’t spoil the final two entries for you as – to me at least – they had quite profound significance.

One other minor irritation: none of the entries offer a description of the speaker. Which would be fine, if the cover didn’t describe them: the detective, rejected daughter, mathematician, dancer, collector. If the voices can be described on the cover, why not in their sections? So, note to Ashon’s editor: add an introduction and character description and your gem will sparkle more.

It wasn’t until I got to Entry 121, that I started to grasp the overarching meaning of this book. Entry 121, we learn in the text, is a coach driver, who finds significance in his life through his passengers. If they’d a good journey, then he’s happy. Is that what this book is saying? We’re all life’s passengers?

Some entries later – at 137 – it becomes evident that’s precisely what Ashon’s voices are telling us, in chorus. Voice 137 says: “Everybody in this world, we are like passengers. We’re going, we just don’t know the place we stop.” Today, we could die, they say. If you see someone who needs help – then help, they instruct, “because you never know tomorrow”.

Or as another voice told us – much earlier – foreshadowing Ashon’s grand theme: “Enjoy the ride”. That’s enough.

The Passengers by Will Ashon is out now in hardback from Faber priced £14.99