“Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.” That’s how Emma Donoghue describes a real-life railway disaster in her thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel, The Paris Express. Inspired by an iconic 1895 photo of a train engine dangling out of Paris’s Montparnasse Station, the multifaceted author (Room, The Wonder), artfully blends fact with her astute imagination to create a story representing a broad slice of social concerns, including innovation and technology, as well as art. As the train hurtles toward its fate, Donoghue examines the transportation mode as a metaphor—the train is “a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.”
The action of the novel begins with an 8:30 a.m. stop in Granville and continues through the Paris crash that afternoon at 4:01. Chapters are organized like a train schedule, marking various station arrivals, departures and delays, while passengers arrive and occasionally move from carriage to carriage, each carriage “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.”
And oh, what a dinner party this is! People of all ages, classes, races and nationalities interact, as Donoghue introduces characters based on passengers who were actually aboard that 1895 train, as well as other real-life personalities whom she “invites” aboard, and a few characters entirely of her invention. Amid the drama, Donoghue has plenty of fun, for instance, having her characters refer to the recently erected Eiffel Tower as “that monstrosity,” or writing that “Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his first Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.”
Tension builds from the start of the journey, when a radical young woman nicknamed Mado raises the suspicions of Russian emigree and social worker Elise Blonska. Donoghue explains the technology and handling of the locomotive in riveting scenes, bringing the crew to life amid descriptions of corporate greed. Only a writer as talented as Donoghue could have readers so immersed in fin de siecle Paris while also, perhaps, musing about the motivations and movements involved in the contemporary assassination of which Luigi Mangione has been accused.
Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, as Donoghue wonderfully illuminates the fleeting qualities of both life and art. As Henry Tanner notes: “That’s the paradox of trains. . . . They show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”
Read our interview with Emma Donoghue about The Paris Express.
