Tales from a train sweet and sentimental

TRAINS AND LOVERS<br>The heart's journey<br><b>Alexander McCall Smith</b><br><i>Polygon</i>
TRAINS AND LOVERS<br>The heart's journey<br><b>Alexander McCall Smith</b><br><i>Polygon</i>
Four passengers, strangers to each other, find themselves travelling together in a train compartment from Edinburgh to London, and, quite unlike most other passengers in trains in Britain, start exchanging stories, stories about love, in particular, love at first sight.

Andrew, a young Scot from Oban, is returning to London after a visit home to take up a post at an art auction house in London, where he had previously met Hermione, a fellow intern during training, with whom he fell in love.

Their relationship starts well but becomes complicated by Hermione's other love and loyalty to her somewhat unlovable father. In the process Andrew learns tolerance and generosity, virtues that, as the novel discusses later, may well be the result of his own ''moral luck'' in childhood.

Kay, an older woman from Perth, Australia, after a visit to Scotland from where her father emigrated to Australia, then recounts the story of her parents' lifelong love, the result of a penpal correspondence between the outback and Sydney. Her parents spent many years together in the outback, rearing a family.

When the train pulls into King's Cross station, Kay muses about the life they led: ''You see, my father and my mother, who didn't get anywhere very much or achieve great things. Other than a well-kept station and some flowers in the desert. Is that enough? I like to think that it is.''

Hugh, a ''tousle-haired'' young English businessman, eventually tells the others the tangled story of his affair with Jenny, after they fell in love with each other following an accidental meeting at a railway station.

David, a well-heeled, sophisticated American from Buffalo, seems a more detached observer, adding his own comments to the others' stories but withholding his own tale of unrequited love for a boy his own age decades ago, ''a love that'', for McCall Smith, still ''cannot speak its name''. When they reach London the four go their separate ways, their ''Brief Encounter'' over and probably without consequences.

Though the stories are told by the passengers to each other, each narrative leaves the railway carriage to fill in a back-story, becoming, if briefly, a short story in its own right.

The first third of this book, that falls outside any of the novel sequences for which Alexander McCall Smith is best known, is well-written and carries the reader into the world of art history and connoisseurship that is of perennial interest to the outsider.

The narrative then breaks off for Kay to tell her somewhat more mundane romantic story and the reader begins to realise the book is a vehicle for the writer's views on kindness, fairness, ''moral luck'' and Kay's belief that ''loving others is the good thing we do in our lives'', the last words of the book.

Given so many wholesome sentiments and passages of such good writing, it may seem churlish to find the experience so unsatisfactory, somewhat akin to being choked with candy-floss. For other readers, I am sure, this novel will not prove too sweet for their taste.

- Peter Stupples teaches at the Dunedin School of Art.

Add a Comment