Book Review: The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue

Perhaps you’re ignorant of many famous historical events, like I am. I’m always astounded at what I don’t know and continue to learn as I age. Books are (of course) a wonderful way of educating myself which is why I’m always recommending them. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue is a great example of why fiction can be so educational; it’s a fictional take on a famous historical event, written expertly enough to keep our attention while transporting us to another time and place. I had never heard of the Montparnasse Derailment before picking up Donoghue’s latest, but now I feel fairly well equipped to explain it to others who aren’t familiar with it. Reading this book however, is still the best way to learn about it.

Plot Summary

Taking place over one day, The Paris Express depicts a variety of characters who have boarded Engine 721on October 22, 1895. Each chapter is a different stop the train makes across the French countryside; it leaves Granville on the Normandy Coast, and ends up in Paris later that day. Close to 10 different storylines are introduced in a very short span of time; one woman is studying medicine, and suspects a fellow young passenger to have a deadly disease. Another woman is a performer travelling with her show monkey, a wealthy politician delays the train’s schedule by 10 minutes as his first class carriage is attached to the other first class cars, one woman riding in third class is struggling through some mild labour contractions, a Black American painter recounts a humiliating scenario to a fellow passenger that he recalls from his childhood, and a man sells a surprising amount of coffee drinks and snacks from a giant carafe attached to his back. Alongside the passenger storylines, we repeatedly return to the different men tasked with running and driving the train, the suspense building as the train is pushed faster and faster, the employees desperate to make it to Paris on time as their Christmas bonus is calculated based on their ability to consistently arrive on time.

My Thoughts

As you could probably tell with my plot summary above, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the number of characters and storylines I was expected to follow. I struggled to remember each of them as we jumped back and forth, so I found it difficult to connect, or even care about them, knowing they were headed towards a terrifying accident. In some cases, we only stayed with a character for a paragraph or two, so despite the fact that there was only one setting and only a few hours passed, I still found this book very ‘busy’. There is one character that we were introduced to, that I did want to hear much more from, but we only really visited her once; the train itself. She could sense danger within her, and there was a neat little side note that described the materials she was made out of, where these raw materials were sourced, and how she came to life. This second only lasts for about a page and half, but it was illuminating and creative; two words that are often used to describe Donoghue’s impressive writing abilities.

There is one particular character on the train (and I won’t give away too many details here to avoid spoilers) who is disgruntled with her lot in life, the struggles her and many others face, and harbours a dangerous anger that’s ready to boil over. This character plays a pivotal role for the reader; her resentments are described both in her head, and to other passengers, so we get a real sense of the struggles of the poorer folks at that time. Her violent anger also acts a suspense mechanism; we are afraid of what she is capable of, and although we know the train is going to crash at the end of the line, we aren’t sure what happens in the third class cabins before that crash happens – are their lives in danger for other reasons? It’s a nail biter to the very end.