Actor James Norton brings a sense of gentle longing to Matt Haig’s latest novel, a tale of an octogenarian looking back on the life he’s departed. The book begins with former business magnate Wilbur Budd suffering a heart attack after receiving a phone call from his ex-wife, Maggie, whom he has not heard from in years.
Wilbur is already feeling a bit peculiar when Maggie calls.
“I wanted to hear your voice,”she tells him wistfully. Minutes after getting off the phone, Wilbur collapses on his front lawn and dies.
What sounds like the end of a story is, in fact, the beginning. Wilbur finds himself standing on a train platform with his mind
“reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash”.A train arrives and a woman disembarks, introducing herself as Agnes. She says she is the ghost of a bookseller who once ran a shop Wilbur visited as a child, and that she will guide him through a voyage across his past.
As Wilbur travels through the moments that shaped him, the journey pauses at formative scenes including his brother’s premature death and Wilbur and Maggie’s honeymoon in Venice.
“This is death,”Agnes tells him.
“Where your life flashes before your eyes. This is how it happens. Fast and slow. Like life … ”
With shades of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, The Midnight Train is a cosy feelgood tale despite its ostensibly bleak themes of death and the afterlife. James Norton, known for Happy Valley and McMafia, narrates the audiobook and brings a rare softness and gentle longing to the performance.
As Wilbur reflects on times gone by, he comes to realise the things in life he could have done better. The audiobook is available via Canongate and runs for 8hr 36min.
What else is worth listening to?
Further listening includes You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate, Headline, 8hr 27min. It is a candid memoir in which the actor best known as Kelly Bundy from Married … With Children reflects on her childhood raised by a heroin-addicted mother, becoming the family breadwinner as a child actor, and her recent diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. It is read by the author.
Another option is Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Audible Studios, 12hr 47min. Saskia Maarleveld reads this smartly plotted eco-thriller from the Booker prize-winning author of The Luminaries. It tells of a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand, named after the moving forest in Macbeth, who set their sights on a plot of land owned by an American billionaire.
