Love at the Railway Hotel by Sue Hurley: book review

 

Love at the Railway Hotel (2010) is set in rural Victoria, a southern state of Australia, from 1972 to 1983.

The main character, Lisa Macleod, is 13 years old when her mother Anna runs away with another woman, the local hairdresser. In 1977 this is scandalous. How does she react? How do people in the small town treat Lisa, her older brother Michael, and her father Leo, the owner of the Railway Hotel? Whose fault was it anyway?

The novel begins with the narrator at nearly twenty years old reflecting on this critical point in her life: “My life would have turned out differently if Mum hadn’t run off with Loretta Petersen from the Shady Lady Beauty Salon the year that I turned fourteen, leaving me stuck in Celestial Creek with a broken heart and a lifelong distrust of hairdressers.”

It was Loretta’s husband that told Anna’s husband that the two women had left town, together. The whole of Celestial Creek, population 6,302, was talking about it, but mostly amongst themselves, and not openly to the Macleod family. Was Lisa one too? Or does she like boys? As it turned out, the boys still liked Lisa. And in the place where her mother met her father, at the Railway Hotel when the Overland train hit a truck and the passengers had to stay overnight, she too was attracted to the boys from her town. Lisa lived in the hotel, and it was where people met and fell in love. Her father too fell in love again, when Greta came to town.

Lisa also wanted to leave Celestial Creek – 300 kilometres west of Melbourne – to have a ‘real’ life. And she does, when she gets a job at seventeen in Melbourne, the state capital, working in a camera store. But there’s still the ‘issue’ of her mother – why does it take so long for Anna to contact her daughter? But when her mother does phone, things just aren’t the same between them. “I’ve got no clear picture of Mum’s current life … I haven’t seen her for ages, phone calls between us are awkward and I never accept any of her invitations to visit … I don’t know if she just happened to love Loretta more than Dad. But deep down, it’s not the whole ‘living with another woman’ thing that I really mind … I can’t live with … the simple, unavoidable truth that Mum left me.” Lisa does go back to Celestial Creek, when her Aunt has bad news.

Hurley writes simplistically, from the heart of a local girl trying to understand love and life – the love of her mother’s for another woman, the love of her father’s for another woman, and the loss that Loretta’s husband has to endure. At the same time, she is trying to understand her own feelings towards those who love her. While the family issues are not explored in-depth, the novel sets them in a different time and space, when it was easier to withdraw than to explore.