Platform Seven
Reviewed By Meg Melbourne November 25, 2019
Author Louise Doughty
Distributor: Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 9780571321940
Publisher: Faber
Release Date: September 2019
Website: https://www.allenandunwin.com
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Platform Seven is Louise Doughty’s ninth novel, a novel in which she delves into the darker side of human behaviour with emphasis on the psyche behind this behaviour. Platform Seven certainly continues this theme.
Peterborough Railway station is an unremarkable place. There have been two suicides from the platform, eighteen months apart; thus, begins the story of Lisa Evans but who is Lisa Evans and what is keeping her trapped-on Platform Seven? How does she escape?
Lisa was the first suicide: she has no memory of her life and how she ended up on the platform unable to escape, she only knows she has the ability to know what people are thinking. She knows what the elderly man stealthily entering the station is about to do.
Try as she might Lisa cannot stop him from leaping to his death in front of a train. He is the second suicide. Somehow this liberates her and as her memory gradually returns, so too does her freedom.
Describing herself as a ghostly form floating as consciousness Lisa reflects back on her life with fiancé, Matty, a doctor who is abusive and controlling, although that is not how he presents. With this comes intense pain as she recalls and realises how corrosive he was to her to her wellbeing.
Lisa Doughty has once again presented a chilling exploration into the effects of toxic relationships, as she slowly, bit by bit reveals the tragedy that this creates, which in this case lead to Lisa being a nebulous, almost etheric form lingering on the Peterborough Station, neither of this world or the next.
As Lisa’s story is revealed so to are the lives of the staff who work at the Station, bringing into stark focus the complexities of human relationships, which makes this rather unusual storyline work in spite of introduction of the ghostly element, which has been used as the vehicle to tie the plot together.
For those who love to be chilled and thrilled in their reading, grab a copy.