I frequently travel back and forth these days between my home in Cambridge and London, in order to spend time with grandchildren. I rather enjoy being part of that enormous tide of people that flows into London every day, and across it, and then flows back out again every night, train after train from all those mainline stations, each train filling up with people and rushing out into the home counties, only for another another train to arrive and fill up in turn. What a strange thing: all those thousands of human souls on the move, each one an entire universe!
My favourite station is Blackfriars, which (uniquely as far as I know) straddles the Thames on its own bridge. As you emerge from the train on Platform 1, you are faced with a single enormous window, the length and height of the station itself, which takes in, to your left, St Pauls and the prestige office blocks of the City, and to the right, the Tate Modern building in the foreground and the Shard behind it, while between them the wide river, sparkling in the sun, is spanned by a series of bridges, each slightly more hazy than the last, stretching back to Tower Bridge in grey silhouette in the distance. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, and it puts me in mind of a poem by Wordsworth that my father liked to recite, about the morning view from another London bridge:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…
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I was talking to a writer friend, Colette, about the Neapolitan Quartet and I said one of the things I felt the lack of when I was reading it was sensory information of any kind. The narrator just talks about relationships and interactions and, if she mentions the material setting at all, does so only minimally, in the way that a dramatist does in stage directions. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a personal choice. What you exclude is as important as what you include in any sort of work of art. Colette likes pared-down writing and, as she says, descriptive passages in books are often boring and can feel quite self-indulgent on the author’s part. But my own personal feeling is that I want a novel to evoke, as far as possible, the full breadth of the feeling of being alive, and experiences such as standing in front of that window, or being part of the flow of people in and out of London, are as much a part of that, as are personal interactions.
It seems to me (and this probably isn’t an original thought) that of all art forms, novels are uniquely well placed to encompass the whole picture: interior and exterior worlds, human relationships and material reality… Other art forms can arguably portray any one of these things better than novels can, but novels (and even short stories for that matter) have a sort of ‘jack of all trades’ quality that means they can bring everything together in a way that no other form quite can.
* * *
The other day on Platform 1 of Blackfriars station, with a few minutes to wait for the train to Peckham, I was standing by the glass taking in the view next to a smartly-dressed woman who was doing the same thing. I made some comment about how beautiful it was and she said ‘You know what? I pass through this station every single day, and I never grow tired of it.’
See also (while on London bridges): Waterloo Sunset
