Never talk to stranger on a train

Tale of two women entangled in a gothic exit strategy from their unhappy marriages.

Amanda Craig confirms in her latest wise and witty novel, offering compassion and philosophical stimulation every women she interviewed about divorce used these words  “It would be much easier to be a widow.”

Two women, Hannah who is desperate after her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion, and marriage become rancid as her wild and violent husband Jake left her penniless and another elegant and beautiful gauzy green-eyed woman Jinni, in the luxury of air-conditioned first class sitting alone drinking chilled wine meet on a intolerably crowded and hot train from London to Penzance. Dishes out silky sympathy.

When Hannah is invited into the first-class carriage, she unwittingly walks into a spider’s web.

By the time the train rattles across the River Tamar, they together hatched a plot to murder each other’s husbands.

Jinni’s husband  proves not be so very terrible while Jinni herself acquires all the characteristics of Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay.

Jenny with as powerful penetrating gaze presses a very real baby-pink taser into Hannah’s hand and urges her to commit the deed that very day.

 The story is set in Cornwall’s subtropical splendour, the “be-unioned foot of England”, where the proud  and impoverished Cornish, having long since lost their profitable China clay mines and more recently their fishing  almost destroyed, have to rely on food banks and the offensive patronage of wealthy second homers.

Jinni’s enormous husband lives in a crumbling turreted, overgrown mansion swith a friendly deerhound and seriously spooky cellars.

Hannah is revealed to be not the defenceless  and downtrodeen beggar-maid of the Brune-Jones poster on her childhood bedroom wall, but a slight  and dainty beauty  who can slip into a vintage Doir frock  as if it had been made for her.

Craig can skewer an image at speed\: a 1970s varnished pine kitchen, is like a sucked toffee, the spring country side is “frothing, like milk coming to the boil”, and a little girl is “lovely as only a child with milk teeth can be”.

Craig writes “Those in the grip of misery and fury , long to unburden themselves , this is the secret of every organisation from church to social media.”

Craig quotes Oscar Wilde “one’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.”

Jinni, who too, is married to a monstrous man

Hannah has taken work cleaning the houses of the London rich simply to pay the rent and care for her little daughter and now is on route to Cornwall, where her lonely mother  is dying of cancer.

Hannah goes to Jinni’s husband’s home the next night and finds Stan, a huge hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems not the least the care of a half-ruined house and garden.

The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig, Little Brown £16.99, 391 pages.