The Blue Train

The novel is really a series of five linked stories, each about a woman he (or his narrator) loved while in France. Powell's book is really about those moments of falling in love, and the varied trajectories such affairs can take, with Nancy, Erda, Joyce, Madeleine, and Martha. Powell wrote quickly, by which I don't mean he wrote his prose in a blaze of flying fingers (he may have, but I don't know he did). What I mean is he is economical, and his prose moves along. Five love affairs in 122 pages requires a certain pace, after all. But he wrote, also, beautifully, setting a scene, a moment, with cinematic surety. "I saw her on the platform as the train came to a stop: wind-blown blonde hair, expectant face, thin, worried and frowning, wrapped in a gray tweed coat." That is Nancy, a 25-year-old with a problem. The problem is about sex ("I never felt anything," she says), but the two have promised that their relationship would be platonic, so Jack should not be the problem. But, of course, Jack becomes, in part, the solution. Jack's quick passions and warm affection for women as a whole are wonderfully presented, honest and real. He is neither sentimental nor judgmental. The five short affairs slide by too quickly, and the reader is left as bereft as lonely Jack. And yet the novel is not depressing. As Henry Miller says, THE BLUE TRAIN has freshness that makes one re-live his own life, but (says Miller) "I like your life better." I know what he means. One longs for such a sad sweetness. ( Amazon customer)