When Emma Donoghue realized that she and her partner were moving to the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse for a year, a quick internet search about the area revealed something unexpected: a stunning 1895 photo of a train crash at the Montparnasse station—a locomotive dangling from a jagged hole in the second-floor facade. “That train sort of burst out of my screen at me,” she recalls, the excitement of the moment still fueling her voice. And just like that, she had the makings of her 16th novel, The Paris Express.
“The photo has this mysterious quality, because it’s so surreal,” she says. Culturally, it captures a familiar experience when “we’ve invented all these amazing things and something’s gone horribly wrong—just as nowadays.” Plus, trains, Donoghue notes, “have been not just a plot point, but a setting in novels from, really, before the middle of the 19th century, so it was an irresistible combination.”
During a video call from her home in London, Ontario, the Dublin-born writer speaks rapidly, revealing unbridled enthusiasm and humor. Near the start of our chat, she comments, “When you write a book like this, you’re offering reviewers an easy way to be cruel to you. You know—a train wreck of a novel.”
The book is anything but, of course. Over the years, Donoghue has juggled a variety of subjects, including a middle grade series about a family of 11 and a fictionalization of the youth of British diarist Anne Lister. However, as she remarks on her website, since publishing Room, her novel about a 5-year-old boy being held captive with his mother, “I’m mostly known as the locked-up-children writer.” The Paris Express is also set in a confined space, which she says she’s often written about: “I thought a train would be both claustrophobic—because especially in those days, you couldn’t leave your carriage while it was moving—but also broader in terms of the variety of people on board.” The train carriages become “a series of little rooms,” each with their own small group of characters, a very different setup from the classic 1930s train novel “where people are racing through or hiding from each other.”
Her fast-paced thriller is filled with intriguing characters based on actual passengers and crew who were on the train on the day of the crash, as well as real people who were living nearby and “could have been there . . . plausible guests I have invited onto my train,” as she explains in an author’s note. The book takes place during the course of a morning and afternoon, from the train’s 8:30 a.m. arrival at the Granville station until its crash in Paris at 4:01 p.m., with chapters marking various arrivals, delays and departures along the way.
“Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”
Donoghue calls Paris “just a gift to write about,” especially because in the 1890s it “was such a destination city for people from all over the world.” Writing about a place while living there, she says, “not only makes the writing easier, but it makes being in the place more interesting because it means I get to live there in a sort of double sense. So yes, I was enjoying contemporary Montparnasse, but always with a sort of slight kind of haunting feeling of, what would this have been like in 1895?” Readers, meanwhile, may experience the opposite effect—while immersing themselves in the 1895 world that Donoghue has conjured, they will notice numerous parallels to today.
Donoghue deftly uses her real and imagined cast to ponder numerous topics, including the motivations behind terrorism, racism and class, and sexual attraction and secrets: the very same subjects that propel today’s news headlines and the narrative threads of contemporary fiction. For example, one young French passenger, activist Mado Pelletier, seems ready to transform her revolutionary thoughts into action—through sabotage. Meanwhile, American painter Henry Tanner, who is Black, isn’t comfortable riding in a first-class carriage out of fear of reactions to his race, even though French law doesn’t prohibit it, unlike in the United States. And since this is France, this excursion includes romance and more—the relatively short train ride reveals quite a bit about the erotic activities of several passengers. As Donoghue develops relationships among characters, she delicately weaves in a brief but broad tapestry of historical events, innovations and concerns, all while ramping up dramatic tension that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, especially since they know catastrophe lies ahead.
Donoghue knew she wanted her story to be expansive, yet “squeezed very tight.” That said, reader: Do not read the author’s note before finishing the novel. Instead, allow Donoghue’s marvelous action to play out first, preserving her surprises. In fact, she says, “If I could, I would design books so the back pages didn’t open until you have read the entire novel.”
The author emphasizes that “pace is what the novel is all about,” given that the driver and stoker’s pay was tied to the timeliness of the train. For all the characters, “there are no toilets to hide in,” she explains. “There are no dining cars. It meant there was a kind of urgent pressure on me to find somewhere for my passengers to pee, or to find a way for them to buy food. So it was like a ticking clock, basically. Each chapter was either you’re on the train, you’re stuck with these people in this carriage, you’re effectively trapped with them, or else it’s a chapter set in a station where everybody leaps out and tries to meet their needs. And that gave me a chance to have people occasionally change carriages or have brief conversations or sexual encounters while the minutes were ticking away.” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”
“Maybe because I’ve never had colleagues, I’m kind of fascinated by working relationships. Shows like The Office or shows about spies—you know, how people work together.”
Donoghue researched many aspects of the novel both before and as she wrote, devouring “some wonderfully geeky specialist works,” including a “goldmine” of a book by a rather fastidious English stationmaster in the mid-19th century who wrote at length about parcel sorting—which Donoghue translated into a pivotal plot point. She also “haunted” the YouTube feeds of people who restore vintage trains, and she says, “I’m so grateful to the train geeks. I found videos of, in particular, elderly English men who will spend three years lovingly restoring a carriage or even an engine. And then they take it out and do videos of themselves pulling all the knobs. All these people you would not want to get trapped with at a party, but they’re so useful to the novelist.”
“Of course,” she adds, laughing, “When I’m writing a novel about something, I become that person you don’t want to get trapped with at a party. Because I’m like, ‘Oh, since you asked what I’m working on, let me tell you.’ ”
Donoghue parsed all of these minute details with care. “My rule with fiction is that I only put in details if I think my point of view character would care about them. So, in my novel about Irish monks on an island [Haven], there’s a lot about theological subtleties, because they would care. Sometimes, I think, will the reader care? But I have to say to myself, ‘I must be loyal to my point of view character, and then maybe the reader will come with me.’ ”
The train crew became equally crucial. Donoghue says, “Maybe because I’ve never had colleagues, I’m kind of fascinated by working relationships. Shows like The Office or shows about spies—you know, how people work together.” She loved the idea that “the working partnership would be crucial to the success of the journey. That everything depended on the driver and stoker being able to pretty much read each other’s minds” because they couldn’t talk over the noise of the train.
Passengers, in contrast, had to earn their way in. “It did take me a while to sort of choose my cast,” she says. “I researched quite a few people thoroughly, and I even started writing scenes for them on the train. And then I was like, ‘No, you’re not quite earning your place here. You’re interesting people with great backstories, but nothing particularly interesting is happening to you on this day in October 1895.’ So, I would say to my partner, ‘I tipped that one off the train. I pushed that one out the window.’ ” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Nobody could be on the train unless they had something interesting to offer.”
More often than not, when writing historical characters, Donoghue imbues them with traits borrowed from family and friends. For instance, she modeled the murder victim in Slammerkin after her mother. “My loved ones are very tolerant,” she says. “They know that I need some raw material to work on. When I was writing my novel The Wonder about this intelligent, virtuous little girl who stops eating, I used to look at my daughter—who’s never skipped a meal in her life—and think, ‘What would it be like if somebody like her was in 19th-century Irish Catholicism?’ And all her powers and skills kind of got twisted into abstemiousness?’ ”
After completing The Paris Express, Donoghue handed her manuscript to a Polish friend, only to suddenly realize that she had fashioned the character of Russian emigre Elise Blonska after her. She also channeled some of her tender feelings about her daughter, who will start college in the fall, into concerns that another character has for her teenage daughter. Her muses “know that the result is not really them,” Donoghue adds. “I think they’re usually quite happy to have been useful.”
On her website, the award-winning historical novelist says that if she had a time machine, she would go back to late 18th-century London to be a “rich spinster of scandalous habits.” An unabashedly practical time traveler, Donoghue says, “Let’s face it, none of us really want to go back and be a street urchin without asthma medicine. Especially as then our time travel wouldn’t last long, if we’re going to die of diphtheria on day four. We all want time travel on our terms.”
Photo of Emma Donoghue © Woodgate Photography.
