platform seven by louise doughty

the times 10 august 2019

Platform Seven, Louise Doughty’s ninth novel, begins with the suicide of a man who throws himself under a train at 4am at Peterborough Station. He is observed by the narrator — the ghost of a woman called Lisa Evans, who died in similar circumstances 18 months before.

Those of us who baulk at being told a story by a ghost can be reassured that Doughty fully inhabits the character of this insecure thirtysomething teacher. The mystery over Lisa’s death is the engine that powers the plot.

Though Lisa is not a particularly remarkable person, she is credible and her plight moving. Doughty depicts her emotionally abusive relationship with her toxic boyfriend with skill and empathy. She evokes a textbook case of “gaslighting”, without ever using the buzzword (which refers to the way women are made to doubt their sanity by manipulative partners). She also (intentionally or otherwise) echoes one of the findings of the behavioural scientist Paul Dolan in his recent book Happy Ever After that unmarried, childless women are the happiest group in the population by portraying the joy of Lisa living alone in her first home: “I would sit crosslegged and look out over the plain communal gardens and listen to the birdsong and feel, calmly and clearly, that this, this being alone with my thoughts and my breakfast, was surely one of the most romantic things a person could do.”

Readers may wish that the rules of Evans’s ghosthood were defined more sharply from the beginning: it is only in the final third of the novel that several important aspects of her ghostly state become clear, not least that she cannot remember how she died (this is helpful, for narrative tension, admittedly).

The author, however, has done her homework on life in a railway station and there is tenderness particularly in her description of Dalmar, the Somali security guard at Peterborough station. One of Doughty’s successes in this novel is examining characters with ostensibly quite ordinary existences and imbuing their lives with complexity and yearning. She is also thoughtful in exploring difficult subjects such as emotional abuse, suicide and grief.

Although Platform Seven covers bleak territory, this is a hopeful novel, for almost all the characters, not least Dalmar, the lonely security guard. He is approached by what seems to him like an unlikely love interest and he realises “instead of having to make everything happen, he could just let something happen, that someone else could make it happen and for once, the something that someone else makes happen to him could be a good thing, a kind thing.”

This review first appeared in The Times