Already high in the bestseller
lists, The Christmas Train is a light morsel of fun reading. Journalist Tom Langdon takes a train from Washington
DC to Los Angeles
to meet his girlfriend, with whom he has a long distance and rather remote
relationship. He would fly, but he has
been banned from the airlines. He is not
at a good point in his life, being unhappy with both his career and his love
life. He used to work as a foreign
correspondent often reporting on wars, but he has given up the thrill of that
life for far more mundane writing jobs. 
What’s more, he is full of regret at the greatest mistake of his life,
his failure to ask Eleanor Carter, the one true love of his life, to marry
him. But this train journey gives Tom
the chance to rethink his life and rethink his priorities.

Baldacci populates his train with a
colorful cast of characters and puts them through several mysteries and
adventures. His hero, Tom Langdon, is
smart and observant, and the reader should find it pretty easy to sympathize
with him. By an amazing coincidence, it
turns out that Eleanor is also on the train, working as a writer for famous Hollywood
filmmaker Max Powers. Baldacci keeps the
plot moving fast and the mood faintly comical. 
One can follow the main thread of the story even if one is only half
paying attention to it, and the book is not weighed down by any lengthy
deliberations on the meaning of life or the state of contemporary society. The closest the book comes to engaging in the
real world is in its occasional explanation for why lack of government
financial support has led to the sorry state of the train system in the US. Baldacci also makes a few references to
trains in films in literature and cinema, such as Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. 
Demanding readers may judge The Christmas Train to be frivolous
melodrama, lacking even a difficult mystery to be solved. The book is certainly not for people wanting
to be seriously challenged by their reading, but most people should find it
mildly entertaining. One might contrast
it to Agatha Christie’s Murder
on the Orient Express, which I suspect would come off better in the
comparison as the more amusing and intriguing novel.

The unabridged
audiobook is read well by Tim Matheson;
unusually the recording also has music added at dramatically important points,
along with various train sounds. The audiobook is on six CDs held in a foldout light cardboard
wallet rather than a plastic case. The
high quality packaging may be the most enjoyable and memorable feature of the
book.

© 2002 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review. His main
research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry. He is especially interested
in exploring how philosophers can play a greater role in public life, and he is
keen to help foster communication between philosophers, mental health
professionals, and the general public.