When
Rae Joyce bought The 32 Stops, she had already visualised what the book would
be like. Danny Dorling is a geographer who's done much to make his subject
visually interesting in recent years through the development of spatial maps,
so Rae was surprised, when she read The 32 Stops, not to find it stuffed with
them in all their primary coloured loveliness. What she was presented with,
however, was an intriguing and equally attractive combination of data presented
as a sort of soap opera written in a way that could easily pass for a pastiche
of Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency. It wasn't a novel, mind; it was an
example of statistics brought to life. Though there were graphs scattered every
few pages to remind Rae the characters originated from facts, the narratives
were so effective that Rae really began to care about the people marking the x
axis of the Central Line, which was, she guessed, the point.
