Now that you have essentially read the longlist, Kevin, if London Train had been part of this longlist, where would you rank it?

I know Hadley (although not well) through her short stories also and I think you have captured a description of her strength in that form — the characters are not so much passive as forced to be reactive to what is happening around them. (Alice Munro has pretty much made an outstanding career out of that . ) And I think that was part of the problem that I had with this novel (as you anticipate). I needed some kind of at least inner strength to maintain my interest.

And if you are working your way through the archives here, please keep posting your thoughts. It is valuable not just to me but to many of the visitors here to have some older posts brought back to the top of the list — it is more than worthwhile to revisit what one’s thoughts about a book are some months (or even years) down the road. Some novels that were only not-so-good on the original reading get better with time; some that were originally quite good tend to fade.

I read this review with interest (I’m new to your blog and I’ve been working my way slowly through the posts) as I am a fan of Tessa Hadley’s short stories, but I haven’t read this novel yet. I’m not even sure if she’s written other novels. She seems to me pretty much in command of short stories and their form. The complaint against London train for its passive characters and nothing really happening – I smiled when I read that because it’s so typical of Tessa Hadley’s short stories–’passive’ souls who ‘do nothing’ but somehow end up changed at the end of the story due to some outside force, event or inner transformation. Of course, these characters are not passive (I’m thinking Thomas in ‘Mother’s son’ or his mother, for that matter) who had and are still having turbulent emotional lives and are living out the consequences of those– this subject matter is terrifically handled in the short story form but perhaps this kind of reflection or exposition is just not appropriate for a novel form where more ‘action’ is required? The gestures in Tessa Hadley’s stories are small, but deeply felt within the confined form of a short story but I can see in a novel, they might be scant, faint or diluted.
I’m not a literary critic, but I love short stories and I can sometimes see how their content doesn’t always travel well into novels.

Just my opinion though.

Thanks

Emily

And I must say that when I moved on to the Enright, the early parts felt like it was Part Three of The London Train, only moved to Ireland. Enright does take her novel to different territory in the last half, however.

It’s a story that, as you’ve said, has been told many times (though how funny that there are so many parallels with the Anne Enright that you’ve mentioned), but I found it engaging and compelling, albeit quietly so.