London Train

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Average customer rating 4 (2 comments)

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The London Train is really two stories in one that merge as the book enters its second half. We are first introduced to Paul who is on his second marriage but most definitely feeling an itch to do something different. He goes out in search of his daughter Pia who became pregnant by an unlikely but sort of obvious person. The second part of the story is about Cora--also running away from her marriage to what seems to be a reasonably nice but unremarkable man. The two meet on a train from Paddington and end up putting what you may call many embers into the fire. In many ways a traditional love story about two individuals who happen upon each other by chance. Look out for what in my opinion was a surprise ending in the final pages.

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Desperate for real experience (4.25*s) This novel, situated in both small-town Wales and London, perceptively and sympathetically explores the fragility of seemingly stable middle-class marriages. It is through the thinking of her characters that the author subtly shows that small dissatisfactions, misperceptions, and unhappiness can ultimately have very corrosive impacts on marriages. Yet, the author suggests that from such deterioration, there may rest the potential for new understandings, chances for new starting points. The first half of the book is devoted to Paul, a sometime teacher, writer, and literary critic, who is increasingly at odds with his proficient, upper-class wife, Elise, who runs a successful business selling restored antiques. His life is not going well: he is preoccupied with a bad case of writer’s block and is in a constant battle with a neighbor who insists on bulldozing the pristine beauty of the area surrounding Paul’s large country house. After an especially hostile argument with his wife, forty-something Paul winds up in a small run-down London flat living with his 20-year-old daughter and her inept Polish merchant boyfriend, Marek. He is startled by his attraction to the Marek’s sister, Anna, a small, sinuous, commanding girl. In the book’s second half, the discontents of marriage and life are brought into far sharper focus through the story of thirty-something Cora, an English teacher married for twelve years to Robert, her senior by fifteen years and a government official involved with immigration policy. The initial appeal of Robert, that is, his reserved rationality, begins to fade as Cora imagines him to be obtuse and insensitive, impacting their marriage to the point where she spends most of her time in Wales renovating the house that she inherited from her parents. She takes work in the local library that is well beneath her capabilities, which affords her the mental space to devour women’s stories filled with losses of love and faith. Cora’s life is dramatically changed when she by chance meets a man reading a book of poetry on one of her train commutes to Wales from London. She is not only surprised but luxuriates in the almost devouring interest of this stranger in her entire person: “She began to feel herself enveloped in that rich oil of sexual attraction, so that she moved more fluently, knew there was something gleaming and iridescent in how she turned her head away or smiled at him.” Given the sensuality of that moment, Cora realizes that she cannot let this chance for intimacy slip away ��" so begins a relatively fulfilling, secret relationship over the next several months. “She was the completed thing he wanted, and had got ��" he had seen her whole that very first time on the train, her strong particular stamp of personality written for him to read, clear as a hieroglyph; whereas she was absorbed in his life as it streamed forward, lost in him, not able to know everything he was. She couldn’t have imagined, in her old self, the pleasure to be had in such abandonment.” Many lives and marriages have issues related to politics, class, and faith and revolving around parents, spouses, children, friends, etc, which can be difficult and divisive - there is no shortage of those matters in this book. But it is the subtle observations by the author’s characters that bring those issues and life’s details to the personal, feeling level, driving their behavior far more than purely logical considerations. Clearly, from this book it is evident that even the middle-aged need a certain amount of emotional intensity and connectedness in their lives. When missing, there are repercussions and no little effort will be made, regardless of rationality, to fill the emotional voids. And such desires are relentless. “Once, Cora had believed that living built a cumulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you against emptiness. … Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.”