Platform Seven book review: Things to do in Peterborough when your dead
Platform Seven by Louise Doughty takes the ghost story from its familiar literary surroundings of a haunted house and puts her ghost inside a routine English railway station in Peterborough. The name of Doughty’s ghost is Lisa. She is a practical ghost; you can picture wearing contemporary cloths not that ghostly gown off caricature. As a ghost she shares traits with the two angels who feature in Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. They observe life so too does Lisa. A dead person haunting the world of the living is a practical ruse for an author to view the world of Peterborough. She can observe unseen. People pass through the station, but Lisa stays, begging the question; is this Lisa’s purgatory? Most come to catch a train, some race through the concourse or sit down holding a sandwich.
The train platform is a jumping off point, people get on and off the train. Others neither get on the train or get off, preferring to stay near the platform gap, that space between a train car and the edge of the station platform. Once there, they brood with dark thoughts racing through their mind. Lisa meets one such soul, the first of many encounters she has with both the living and the dead. Doughty lays down her rules concerning what her ghost Lisa can and cannot do. Even managing in the book, a short reflection on how ghosts are represented in books and films. On Platform Seven, a ghostly presence is felt by those alive, maybe nothing more than an unexpected breeze from nowhere. Communication between living and dead is far from clear and certainly not verbal. The book conveys a sense of longing between Lisa and the living. She can look, stare intensely at the living but she can’t touch them.
The reader starts at Peterborough railway station where Doughty sets up the story. The station is the anchor of the story. No matter where Lisa goes in Peterborough it is to the station that she returns. Doughty writes well, sometimes very well especially in those parts of the book that are the ghost story. She knows how to draw the reader in and keep them reading. Her prose is neither flowery nor functional but well-pitched in the service of the story. Doughty does introduce the occasional word that I needed to look up; ‘semaphoring’, it is an ‘apparatus for visual signalling’.
The book is two stories; one a contemporary ghost story and the other social commentary about abuse within relationships. The story moves from ghost to social commentary with the introduction of Matty who Lisa is an abusive relationship with. This is the second story within the book, and it is very good but is more conventional than the ghost story part of the book. When the book is occupied with the ghost story Doughty’s writing style is more literary but when we move into the story of her relationship with Matty it is more conventional but still compelling. Matty is a character not a million miles from another Doughty character, Mark Costly from her book The Apple Tree Yard. Mattie like Mark Costly, is a too perfect to believe. He is a boyfriend to whom others might whisper in Lisa’s ear two words of warning or opportunity ‘wedding bells. Mattie is what used to be called a street angel but a house devil. He presents himself very well to her friends but once he’s at Lisa’s flat were, he has by now billeted himself he shows his controlling side. As a reader you see the warning signs about Matty, but Lisa does not. All of this leaves the reader needing the answer the question of how Lisa died? was she murdered? did she throw herself under a train? As ghost Lisa is a detached observer of everything around her including British Transport Police investigations, the life of a Sudanese refugee and others. Platform Seven is a compelling page turner of a read that has flourishes of great writing but is not afraid to give the reader some social commentary on what it is like to live in the UK.
