TeaThe latest novel from Matt Haig, author of Reasons to Stay Alive, begins with an octogenarian having a heart attack. Former business magnate Wilbur Budd is already feeling a little awkward when he gets a call from his ex-wife Maggie, whom he has not heard from in years. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she tells him sadly. Minutes after turning off the phone, Wilbur collapses on his front lawn and dies.
What seems like the end of a story is, in fact, the beginning when Wilbur finds himself standing on a train platform and his mind “resonating as if on some vast cosmic cymbal”. A train arrives and a woman gets off and introduces herself as Agnes. She is, she says, the ghost of a bookseller who ran a shop where Wilbur visited as a child. She will guide him on a journey into his past, punctuating formative moments including his brother’s untimely death and Wilbur and Maggie’s honeymoon in Venice. “This is death,” Agnes tells him. “Where your life flashes before your eyes. That’s how it is. Fast and slow. Just like life…”
With shades of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, The Midnight Train is a cozy feelgood story, despite its obviously bleak themes of death and the afterlife. The narrator is Happy Valley and McMafia actor James Norton who brings a rare softness and gentle longing to his performance. As Wilbur reflects on the past, he realizes that he could have done things better in life.
Available via Canongate, 8 hours 36 minutes
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