The London Train by Tessa Hadley, for a TBR Challenge

In mid-March I read The London Train by Tessa Hadley for the 2019 TBR Pile Challenge hosted by Alex at Roofbeam Reader . I thoroughly enjoyed this read yet was equally perplexed by it.

Well over half of The London Train is devoted to the story of Paul, a writer and father of two young girls with his second wife. They live in a country setting about 20 miles from Cardiff, Wales. Paul is in his mid-40s, and is definitely restless at this point in his life. His mother died not long ago. He seems rootless, as if he's searching for a purpose or a passion to anchor him. He soon discovers that his oldest daughter Pia, a university student, the only child he had with his first wife, has gone missing. His mission to re-establish a relationship with her, by joining her in London, leads him to try on a some new roles and new ways of being with himself.

I was stunned when the novel abruptly shifted to the story of Cora, a married woman in her mid-30s, who is in a desperate and painfully rootless place herself. In my estimation, the Cora chapters were brilliantly (please let me say that again), brilliantly crafted. I think I nearly held my breath throughout the few chapters that told her story. I was so swept up that I lost all sense of myself. I cried, with the keenest sense of empathy and recognition. The reader enters Cora's world, fast discovering that she recently nursed both of her parents to their deaths, one after the other. (Cora is an only child.) It's obvious that her rootlessness is grief-related. Then two paths cross for a brief time.

Most Goodreads reviewers of this book gave it a "3." Because I like Hadley's work, and because I love what she's able to do with minor characters, not to mention her in-depth characterizations of houses and landscapes, I would have given it a "4." It is not her finest book perhaps, but that makes no difference to me because I really admire her as an artist and I'll end up reading everything she's written.

Sometimes I find myself "playing editor" with a novel, and in the case of The London Train, I wondered if it might have been more powerful, and if it might have "jelled" to a greater extent, if the story had been focused around Cora, with Paul playing the lesser role.