Perceptive, Articulate, Fascinating - The London Train

Tessa Hadley is an enchantress with words, a siren who lures then captures readers with graceful, tantalizing prose. Perceptive, articulate she transforms characters from ordinary human beings into fascinating men and women whose innermost thoughts are shared with us.

With the first pages of THE LONDON TRAIN, a novel divided between two characters, Paul and Cora, one may wonder where the author is going with her narrative. Yet her words are so fetching that one continues, inexorably drawn into the characters' lives.

Paul is a writer not given to self-discipline. He lives with his second wife who refurbishes furniture and their two young daughters. His mother recently died, and he finds himself unexpectedly saddened by her death. He's not happy at home, but one is never quite sure why. A spat, not the first, with his wife sends him off to London where he locates Pia, his teenage daughter from his first marriage. Pia has left school, refuses to come home or communicate with her mother - she is pregnant.

Pia lives in a rundown London flat with her Polish boyfriend (who, by the way, has a child in Poland). Nonetheless, he's an enterprising fellow who appears to be taking the best care he can of Pia, and Paul is attracted to their way of life. So much so that he moves in with them, sleeps on the floor, and even helps them out as a van driver. He seems to have regressed in years, become carefree again and forgotten about his wife and children in Wales.

Cora has also abandoned her home, leaving her husband, Robert, giving up hope that they will ever have a child together, and going to Cardiff to redo the home of her dead parents. She, too, appears to be aimless, changed, if you will, given to self-recrimination. As her friend, Frankie describes her, "Now, her spontaneity was extinguished. You knew about disillusion, but you didn't really believe in it as a tangible force, or anyway not in its coming on so soon - after all, they were only in their mid thirties."

What is the connection between these two seemingly disparate characters. Ah, that is for you to discover. Hopefully, you'll read more than one book this summer. But, if it is just one - let it be THE LONDON TRAIN.

Highly recommended.