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The London Train

The London Train is a novel in a two-part form. Research challenges included: 1 to write a more political novel than I had done before, but to write not about party politics, but seriously about our whole political life. 2 The realist novels and stories I write have a mode of capturing life which is essentially parochial; their work is digging down narrowly into local ecologies of behaviour and cultural arrangement and meaning. How to reconcile this, in the portrait of Paul, with the whole content of his thought? 3 How to reconcile a character’s thought, full of abstractions, concepts, and a vivid awareness of himself as existing in his historical moment, with the necessary values of parochial thick description? The temptation was to set these thoughts of his out at their full length – weren’t they interesting as ideas? But that seemed to fail as fiction writing. Research practice centred on the long process of finding The London Train’s eventual two-part form, and resolving this problem of inscribing the grand narratives of our collective life inside the individual-sized small spaces of my mimetic fiction, which prefers the intuitive leap to the logical sequence. The novel in its final version captures its politics – of economic decline, of class, of climate change – as a shadow presence, everywhere in the characters’ interactions and fragmentary perceptions, rather than explicitly.