A better world is possible

People are not as bad as they appear. They are worse, Oscar Wilde would quip. They are better, much better, deep inside provided you care to see, Clare Pooley would chide Wilde.

The People on Platform 5 is Clare Pooley’s novel which is more inspiring than most inspirational literature and more motivating than most motivational books. It belongs to a new genre. Feel-good fiction is a new genre, I guess. This book belongs to that class and it deserves an eminent place there.

This novel brings some strangers together on a train from Hampton Court to London Waterloo and back. These people are all regular commuters on that train as they go to work in the morning at the same time and return home in the evening, at the same time again, every day. They see each other regularly. But they don’t know each other, they don’t care to know either. That’s how people in cities are.

But a medical emergency brings a few of these people close to one another. And there begins the story of this novel which shows us the beautiful personalities that lie hidden beneath the masks that people wear. Each character in this novel is charming in his/her own way, though initially and externally they would appear just like any ordinary office-goer – banal.

57-year-old Iona takes most of our attention though every other character is equally enchanting. Iona is the one who brings out the magic that lies in the hearts of the others. She is a lesbian who lives with her partner Beatrice who is referred to as Bea. It is only halfway through the novel that we will come to know that Bea is now in a care home because she is a patient of acute Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t remember even Iona though Iona is working to earn money for Bea’s care. Lulu, her bulldog, is Iona’s constant companion on the train, in the office, wherever she goes.

Iona is a magazine advice columnist – an agony aunt, though she hates that label. She answers readers’ queries about life’s problems. But her answers aren’t particularly appealing to the new gen. She learns to answer the new gen’s questions better by consulting some of her fellow passengers. But then she realises how “fake” she is. It’s not her own answers that she now gives. But she needs the job. However, her magazine chucks her soon.

In the meanwhile, she had become a favourite among her fellow passengers on the train. They come together to convince her that she should start a YouTube channel which eventually becomes so successful that the same magazine which threw her out now wants her back. She tells them to get lost. They are still fake and Iona is not.

The problem with most people is that they are helpless in a tough world and hence put on masks which make them look fake. The stylish dress that Piers wears, his Gucci shoes, Rolex watch, Hermes tie and the smart business suit are all masks because he is now an unemployed worthless man who pretends to be otherwise. He lost his job as a master-trader with a trading firm but is unable to tell his wife, Candida, the truth. So he travels in his business attire every day looking smart. Only looks. Fake.

But he begins to help Martha, a student on the same train, with her math and eventually becomes a teacher in Martha’s school. He is good at that, he finds out. His real self emerges soon. He becomes happy though he has much less money now. It’s not money that keeps you really happy. It’s authenticity. He loses Candida, however, as well as his children. “I don’t want to live a teacher’s small life,” Candida tells him bluntly. She knows another man already who is ready to give her and the children an affluent life that a schoolteacher never can. Candida is a fake too.

Martha was naïve enough to send a photo of herself naked, legs apart, to her boyfriend who convinces her that he has seen the vaginas of quite many girls and there is nothing strange in his request. But Martha becomes the school’s joke as her unseemly photo spreads on the social media like a farcical virus. Iona teaches her how to obliterate an unpleasant past by creating a successful present. Pierse teaches her math which was her biggest problem at school. Eventually Martha the blunderer-introvert becomes a shining heroine.

Sanjay (of Indian roots) is a nurse who is another passenger on the train. He falls in love with Emmie, another passenger, without knowing that she has a live-in relationship with Toby. Toby turns out to be a psycho with perfectionist obsessions which begin to put certain straitjackets on Emmie. Emmie now has to wear the dress that Toby chooses, eat what he decides is good for her, do the job that he selects for her… Toby is an extreme form of fakery. Emmie liberates herself from that fake world of Toby’s and… I shall not be a spoilsport. You read the novel, it’s worth it, I assure you.

This novel will teach you that people are not what they seem. Are you ready to dig deep enough? If you are, you will be rewarded with a world of magic. A world of beautiful people. Who, for example, would ever have guessed that this man Piers, who is wearing a dress that an ordinary guy’s entire month’s salary couldn’t afford, is carrying a wretched hell inside him? That his father was an unemployed and worthless person and that his mother was a pathetic alcoholic? That beneath the attire, Piers is a tender person who longed for love?

Who but Iona with her tremendous capacity for penetrating through people’s masks would have discovered the heroine that lay hidden beneath the Martha’s mask of introversion and diffidence? Who else could have taught Martha lessons like: If you give up, they win; They want us to be small, so we have to stand tall; They want us to be silent, so we have to be heard; They want us to surrender; so we have to fight…?

The world isn’t a kind place. Far from it, the world is a harsh place which is determined to decimate us if we don’t fight on. How to put up an authentic fight? This is the most fundamental question that this novel seeks to answer. And it does answer eminently. Read it. I recommend it with my whole heart. You will be rewarded, no doubt. And you will smile a lot too as you read.