Don’t worry, though – the book… and the train… quickly pick up speed, its inevitable conclusion waiting at the end of the journey as the train, its crew, its passengers and we, its readers, rocket uncontrollably into history. Book Review by Robert Wiersema by Emma Donoghue Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue, who was born in Dublin and is now based in London, Ontario has an enviable gift for a writer: the ability to shift, seemingly effortlessly, between two wildly different modes of writing. In fact, she is equally successful whether writing in the historical mode (her 2016 novel The Wonder was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and adapted for film, with the script co-written by Donoghue) or the contemporary mode (her bestselling 2010 novel Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes and the Governor General’s Literary Award. It won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was adapted for film, with Donoghue’s script nominated for the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Academy Award). It’s an impressive feat and it means that, while readers might be surprised by just what they might be reading with a new Donoghue novel, they can be certain of its quality. Such is true of her new novel The Paris Express, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize this fall. Donoghue has returned to the historical for this novel and it is, in a word, stunning. Taking its inspiration from the celebrated photograph of the 1895 train derailment at Gare Montparnasse in Paris, Donoghue builds The Paris Express out of the seven-hour journey of the Granville-Paris Express, beginning with boarding shortly after 8:00 a.m., and finishing with the historical disaster. The novel duplicates the train’s progress both physically and in terms of pace. The Paris Express breaks into chapters according to the train’s routing (‘9:50 a.m. Halt Vire’, followed by ‘10:04 a.m. Depart Vire’, for example), which allows the reader to become, in essence, a passenger aboard the train. They join, en route, the multi-faceted, multi-class assemblage on board. Pacing-wise, the novel begins slowly with the introduction of the passengers including, among many others, Irish writer John Millington Synge, an aging dancer, a young boy travelling on his own, an immigrant coffee-seller, an American painter, several politicians and a young woman – an anarchist – whose plans for a destructive action add a second level of suspense to an already suspenseful premise. There is also the crew of the train, whom Donoghue lingers over almost lovingly, describing their lives and work in painstaking and almost heartbreaking detail. The result is not just a mosaic of individuals, but an impressive overview of French life and society in the fin de siècle. Donoghue’s mixing of fictional creations with true-life figures might give historians pause, but it makes for compelling reading. The Paris Express is full of the very stuff of life. The opening pages are slow, to be sure, but that’s by design. The reader can feel the narrative engines warming up, hear the creak of the great iron wheels as the novel begins to move, lumbering at first, along the track. The Paris Express 44 | www.snowbirds.org
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