Journey of a lifetime

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.