Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

“This job was her life. It was the reason she got up in the morning. It gave her purpose. It was who she was. What would she be without it?”

Iona’s reflection on the part her job plays in her identity introduces the theme of The Complexities of Pursuing One’s Passions. While Iona genuinely loves being an advice columnist, she is also highly dependent upon it for her sense of self-worth—it is “her life” and not just her career. Iona will struggle to reconcile this all-consuming attitude toward her work with the ageist discrimination she faces in her workplace.

“Martha spent a lot of her time feeling like David Attenborough narrating a nature documentary. She was an observer, studying a foreign species, trying to work out their habits and rituals, so she could move among them without being rejected or picked on.”

The reference to nature documentaries narrated by David Attenborough becomes a running joke through the novel, as Martha refers to it again later. Martha’s experience of attempting to navigate complex social hierarchies plays into the novel’s message about The Importance of Making Connections, although Martha’s anxiety here in school will form an important contrast with the more accepting, supportive form of making connections she will experience on the train.

“Piers hated feeling beholden. He liked the satisfying simplicity of knowing that everything he was, everything owned, was down to him, and him alone.”

Piers’s satisfaction in his own self-sufficiency marks an early point in his character development, and a belief he will move away from as he comes to develop friendships with his train gang. His assertion of being entirely self-made poses a contrast to the novel’s broader message that humans need social connection, friendship, and support in addition to fulfilling pursuits.

“It turned out that having broken every norm of commuting already, there was no stopping Iona, who now thought it okay to get involved in everybody’s business.”

As the central protagonist, Iona is a stabilizing feature in the novel’s depiction of connections, as she draws others into her orbit. She is also a destabilizing force, going against the unspoken norms of etiquette on the train (See: Background) to converse with other people. Iona will learn—and prove—that problems are more easily solved when shared.

“She’d taken that stupid picture only because she desperately wanted to fit in, and now she was more isolated than ever.”

Martha’s character arc also begins in isolation and fear. Though a tool designed to connect people, technology and social media work against her to become a means of humiliation and bullying when a picture she thought was private becomes publicly shared, reflecting the novel’s motif of social media as a force for both good and bad connections (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“That woman had made a small hole in a huge can of worms last time he sat with her, and he knew that if she prised it open any further, a whole nest of the things would come swarming out, and he’d never get the lid back on again.”

Piers’s reluctance to converse with Iona, in this passage, is no longer because of the prevailing etiquette around commuting but because he already took a step toward revealing his true feelings, and that scares him. Clare Pooley elaborates on the conventional image of a “can of worms” to point to a tension the novel examines between the need to keep secrets and the need to confess.

“It turned out that [Iona] and Bea had been ‘It Girls,’ back in the eighties and nineties. They’d been constantly pictured at parties and premieres and on private planes and flashy holidays.”

Piers’s perceptions of, and assumptions about, Iona change once he learns about her past as a celebrity figure. Her once-admired status puts a different light on her attempts at flashiness now, which before appeared pitiful to Piers. He now recognizes her appearance as a rebellion against time and age. Iona’s attention-grabbing appearance is humorously contrasted by David’s blandness.

“Darling, what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed, without standing out and making waves?”

This proclamation by Bea ends a memory Iona recalls of a time she and Bea played “strangers on a train” and got thrown out of their carriage for “lewd” behavior (they were two women kissing). Bea represents Iona’s youth and spirit and reminds Iona to find her courage again, functioning as both a character and symbol in the text (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“Why had it taken her so long to see her train carriage as a fascinating portal into other people’s stories, rather than just a way of getting from A to B?”

The train evolves as a symbol of transportation to one of connection and, in the form of the “train gang” (127), a microcosm of community (See: Symbols & Motifs). Iona’s passion is for hearing people’s stories and trying to solve their problems, but she needed to be shaken out of the reserve that customarily attends train travel, especially among commuters for whom the journey has become routine.

“The people standing around them on the platform had given up all pretense of not watching this drama play out, and their heads were swiveling from one contestant to the next, as if they were watching a particularly aggressive pro tennis tournament.”

While the general rule is that strangers do not speak on trains, the train gang’s fellow passengers prove that people have a healthy interest in the lives, and especially the problems, of others. Piers’s sense of his scolding from his wife, Candida, being a public performance foreshadows Martha’s performance later in the play and echoes Iona’s sense of drama. The analogy of the tennis match is an example of the narrative’s use of humor.

“Martha tried to imagine Iona ever becoming a target and failed. The woman was bulletproof.”

The novel plays on the assumptions that characters make about one another that often prove, from a different perspective, to be untrue. Martha’s perception about Iona’s confidence is one such irony, as Iona is privately deeply worried and feeling insecure about her age and future. The novel examines several ways in which characters hide their flaws or fears to their own detriment, and find resolution or emotional support in confiding in others.

“The minute Candida had switched on the house lights, and he was revealed for what he really was, everything fell apart. Stripped of his stage makeup, he was back to being Kevin—the boy he’d been before he’d changed everything about himself, including his name.”

Piers thinks of the lie he was perpetuating for his family as a performance that is shown to be false once the theater lights come on. His reinvention of himself to escape his unhappy childhood speaks to the novel’s theme about Endings and New Beginnings.

“[Piers] thought back, wistfully, to the days when he—like almost every other normal British commuter—knew no one and spoke to nobody on the train.”

The novel’s title sets up a playful contrast between Iona’s “rules” about commuting and the general etiquette that Iona breaks, just as she cheerfully resists other social conventions. While the novel acknowledges that change is painful, Piers will find more security and support in the friendship he forges on the train, speaking to the theme of The Importance of Making Connections.

“It occurred to [Piers] that they were each individual spokes of a wheel, but Iona was the center, the axis, and without her, the group of them had no purpose at all and very little in common.”

The image of the wheel provides another metaphor of transport and connection, much like the train. This passage acknowledges that Iona is the central protagonist, the plot device that has brought them together but also the glue of their social network, the train gang.

“[Martha]’d always believed that adults knew all the answers, and that only she was trying to navigate through life without the requisite instruction manual. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that they were often as lost as she was.”

As a playful variation on the novel’s concerns with age and age-related beliefs, Martha has been assuming that adults have a sounder knowledge than teenagers about how to behave in social situations—another belief that she begins to see is untrue. Martha’s desire for instruction is reflected in her readiness to accept tutoring from Piers and advice from Iona.

“And with those words she felt their disparate worlds connect for a few seconds, and the comforting sensation of being truly seen.”

This passage marks the moment when Iona ceases her performance of the unconcerned, if fading, fashionista and has an emotionally vulnerable moment with Piers. The heart of the book is its message about seeing behind the masks of other people, being seen as one’s true self, and making authentic connections based on those honest exchanges.

“No woman is anyone’s ‘other half.’ We are all entire people […] but sometimes when you put two very different whole people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs. Bea said I was like eggs and sugar, and she was flour and butter, and when you mixed us together, we were more than just the combination of our ingredients, we were the whole damn cake.”

In a novel often about The Complexities of Pursuing One’s Passions, Iona speaks to the subject of romantic relationships. Crucial to the subject of identity, she insists no one is incomplete on their own, but uses the metaphor of the cake to illustrate the sweetness of her marriage to Bea. Bea refers to this image again at the novel’s conclusion.

“When the thing you’ve feared for so long actually happens, you have nothing to be scared of anymore.”

Fulfilling Iona’s early prophecy about Endings and New Beginnings, Piers feels relief at having to start over. He’s been pushed out of a career choice that became unfulfilling, but the ending allows him to reconsider, and pursue, his real wishes and values. Several other character arcs duplicate this pattern of change and reinvention.

“He’d created a gilded cage for her, and she’d just walked into it—gratefully and lovingly, smiling and wearing a diamond solitaire ring.”

All the characters experience a conflict that leaves them feeling trapped in some way. Emmie’s conflict is discovering that her fiancé has increasingly isolated her and is behaving in an abusive and controlling fashion. The metaphor of “the gilded cage” symbolizes how what she thought was love has actually curtailed her options, and she must choose to set herself free.

“His own journey to the edge of the abyss, and his subsequent ‘therapy’ sessions with Iona, seemed to have given [Piers] this need to share. He hoped that was a good thing, because he didn’t know how to reseal the lid on Pandora’s box.”

From glorying in his self-sufficiency and needing isolation to maintain his secret, Piers transforms into someone who has honest and authentic relationships. He also discovers the benefit of sharing his emotions as a therapeutic release while allowing Iona to exercise her talents as an advisor.

“[Iona] was grateful that her friends had such faith in her, but it was too late. She was too old. Past it. She’d been pretending for years, and she was tired of it. Her fingers ached from clinging onto the cliff edge so hard. All of her ached.”

Though she has encountered discrimination elsewhere in her life as a gay woman, the ageism she confronts affects Iona’s spirit and provides the internal conflict that she must overcome in the course of her character arc. The image of the cliff represents the unknown future she faces.

“The biggest change […] was that he no longer felt so alone or ashamed. Hearing other people […] describe the same insecurities that hounded him and the fear that followed him was extraordinarily cathartic and reassuring.”

Sanjay’s experience in the support group at work helps him participate in the book’s message about revealing oneself, making authentic connections, and choosing to reveal secrets for the therapeutic act of sharing. Unlike conventional commuters who choose not to relate to others, all the characters find a reward in the friendships they’ve developed and begin to apply the lesson to other areas of their lives.

“Love is the greatest risk of all, but a life without it is meaningless.”

Iona’s response to Sanjay captures the philosophy of the book, summing up its major themes of The Complexities of Pursuing One’s Passions, turning endings into beginnings, being honest in communicating with others, and seeing behind assumptions or masks.