Platform Seven by Louise Doughty5/18/2023 Doughty doesn’t need to spell it out but she uses Evans’ ghostly nature as an elaborate metaphor for the human spirit. We are intrigued, and we learn heaps about what really happens behind the scenes and what the lives of the station staff are like. She can’t, at the start, leave the station nor can she really interact with the living. We don’t know why she is there (she can’t remember) or what she can do: her boundaries are both well- and ill-defined. The first sets up the concept, with the ghost of Lisa Evans hanging around Peterborough station. There are times when the resulting book rivals anything else I will read this year, and even when the novel stumbles there is plenty to consider. Most audaciously, the narrator is dead, which makes Doughty literally a ghost writer. At its most basic, it is an exploration of a coercive relationship, but it has plenty to say about the value of life and the lives of individuals and the communities in which they live and work. Platform Seven by Louise Doughty is an incredibly ambitious novel. Contains some mild and possibly helpful spoilers
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