Tessa Hadley’s The London Train will feel very much at home in the Paddington branch of W.H. Smith. For like almost all of Dickens’ novels, The London Train involves a series of journeys to and from London. Unlike Dickens, however, Tessa Hadley chooses to subject her characters to repeated trips to South Wales – a part of the world that mostly escaped Dickens’ attention (a paucity of urchins, perhaps?). The London Train differs also from Dickens in that all these journeys add up to less than the sum of their parts. If Dickens’ novels weave new mythologies about how people live together in the modern world, Hadley’s loosely connected stories attempt a lower-key exploration of how even people who have shared a home for years can be very much alone. No myths, just microwave dinners.
The London Train is really two associated novellas connected by the themes of love, infidelity, and Bristol Parkway. The first part tells the story of Paul, a shuffling academic (there really are a lot of disappointed academics in novels these days) and his relationships with his aberrant teenage daughter, his first and second wives, and a strangely fanciable Polish girl (his judgement, not mine). The second part tells the story of Cora, her separation from her civil-servant husband, and the adulterous affair which provides the emotional backdrop to her looming divorce. Suffice to say these stories at one point touch before swinging apart from each other. (Obviously it would be horribly pretentious to put in a metaphor here about railway tracks, points, and junctions – but do feel free to add one yourself if you’re into that kind of thing).
People at the moment seem to like this kind of short baggy book which is somehow more than a set of short stories but less than a novel. It’s certainly good for understated psychological exploration (especially if, like Hadley, you’re only really focusing on one character at a time) but its not so well suited to more extended thinking about how our lives fit together and affect each other.
It’s more than just co-incidence to note that whilst Dickens sends his characters all over the country (or even the world) in a single book, Hadley limits hers to First Great Western and the M4. What she tackles in The London Train is the interior emotional lives of people who have become isolated and constrained, rather than liberated and enlarged, through the relationships they have entered into. (One reason that I’m sure it’s to Virginia Woolf rather than to Dickens that Hadley would be flattered to be compared). Her characters are people making, or contemplating, new starts (Polish immigrants going into business, a young woman dropping out of uni and desperate to grow up fast, a wife leaving her husband and moving back to her childhood home). They want, for different reasons, to shed the past and the history of their previous relationships, in order to be able to become the people they think they really are (Husbands can be so inhibiting). Their journeys are therefore narrow and repetitive because they’re really about themselves and they already know who they are.
Dickens characters, on the other hand, are created by their journeys. They become who they are by building up histories and relationships on their journeys. Pip in Great Expectations, for example, starts out pretty cock-sure about who and what he is. But its only after his life becomes inextricably bound up with a good number of other strange people that he really becomes himself.
It’s particularly difficult to bring these sorts of introspective emotional explorations to any sort of satisfying close. You can’t tie everything together like Dickens would do, even if Hadley does hold out a similar promise of (sort of) happy families at the end of each of her two parts. It’s therefore not terribly surprising that both conclusions (and especially Part Two’s), feel a little forced. At best they stretch credulity. At worst, there’s a whiff of clichéd wish fulfilment.
Perhaps Hadley is illustrating something very profound about life in modern Britain. Perhaps its all just an open return to Cardiff Central these days. I do hope not.
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