The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins

The girl is Rachel, divorced, dissatisfied and drinking to excess; the train is a commuter bone shaker – the 8:04 into London or the 17:56 back. During a regular but unscheduled stop at signals Rachel habitually gazes out of the carriage window at the lives of those whose houses back onto the line just there.

Two houses hold particular interest for her. At one she is enthralled by a couple (she christens them Jason & Jess) living the idyll – morning coffee on the terrace, sharing a glass of wine in the evening, always touching each other, and to all appearances clearly in love. At another house, a few doors down, she used to live but it is now the home of her ex-husband with his new wife and baby.

Rachel begins the narrative in an almost diary fashion, musing on the events of her day, how she feels and reflecting (bitterly) how she got into her current state; though in all aspects she is hampered by alcohol induced memory gaps. But what becomes clear is that something is happening with ‘Jess’ – Rachel sees her kissing another man, then she disappears from view.

Not just from Rachel’s view either – a missing persons case is reported in the local paper. The search is on for Megan Hipswell, who is clearly ‘Jess’ in real life.

Now Megan’s voice is heard, but her narration, in similar diary format, begins a year earlier. It alternates with Rachel’s, but while Rachel’s moves forward day by day Megan’s skips weeks and months progressively catching up to what became a fateful day.

Rachel can’t help getting involved, her voyeurism somehow entitling her to befriend Megan’s husband Scott (the real ‘Jason’), which in turn brings her back into the ambit of ex-husband Tom and his wife Anna. This brings a third narrator, Anna, into the mix, and the story bounces between the three women, revealing some tangled history while bringing out some clever nuances in perspective.

The action, plot and reveal is good enough for any thriller, but the unusual construction and the forensic unpicking of the protagonists’ lives (the real ones behind the outward impressions) lift the book well above the norm.

Highly recommended.

Running For Their Lives – Mark Whitaker

In this dual biography Mark Whitaker relates the lives of Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi; names not as well-known as maybe they deserve to be given their incredible achievements as long distance runners.

Arthur Newton was born in Britain but settled in Natal, trying to make his fortune farming, but having invested time and money improving the land he fell foul of the South African government’s plans to separate farmland into racial divides. His land was in the wrong place, became worthless and the compensation offered derisory. He hit upon a novel idea to publicise his grievance – become famous; the means to fame would be as a runner and the competition he targeted was the 54 mile Comrades (double) Marathon from Durban to Maritzburg.

He worked out his own training regime and running strategy, and despite starting the race as a thirty-nine year old unknown, won it by a clear half hour. This and other successes did little to move forward the farm dispute, and even taking his campaign back to Britain to set a new world record for 50 miles, was to no avail. Back in Natal he gave up the battle and, penniless, walked to Rhodesia. There he got back on the road and broke the 100 mile record, beating a relay team of four athletes.

His farm gone and his days as a top class runner numbered (he was by now 45) he had little choice but to make a move from amateur to professional and entered a bizarre race set up by American impresario CC Pyle. The course across the USA from Los Angeles to New York had athletes running an average 40 miles a day for eighty-four days. Amazingly there were 199 entrants for the ‘Transcontinental’.

Among them was Peter Gavuzzi, until then a steward on a Cunard liner who maintained his fitness by running laps of the deck. Lured by the prize money he, along with the others set off over mountains, through deserts, as much part of a travelling circus as a race. Running together, hours ahead of most, they formed an unlikely friendship – Newton older, middle class, articulate, Gavuzzi young, working class and deferential – sharing a love of running and the necessary embracement of solitude that few others understood.

Professional running, particularly road running, was not a commercial success, depending on novelty as much as performance – Newton & Gavuzzi raced in six day snowshoe marathons and against horses – so when both eventually retired it could have been to obscurity. Yet both men’s later lives contained incident of note.

Gavuzzi was caught on the wrong side of the English Channel when Nazi Germany invaded France, and spent years as a prisoner of war. Newton’s war was a longer and personal one against the athletics establishment. He was convinced his unconventional training theories would benefit British runners but he was barred from engaging with them (officially at least) due to his ‘professional status’.

Newton and Gavuzzi (happily returned from France) got belated recognition in the post-war years as interest in athletics increased in the publicity spotlight of a burgeoning Olympic movement and the race for the four minute mile. But that same Olympic movement, by capping their distance races at a mere 26 miles also rendered Newton’s records at 50 and 100 miles obsolete, and the likes of him and Gavuzzi to relative obscurity.

So the book does a great service in retelling the story. Its tangential departures into early South African politics, American sporting showmanship, Second World War internment, and the amateur versus professional Olympic controversy adds context and depth to the world these two, otherwise unexceptional, men found themselves living through.