Book review: All aboard for an enthralling ride in this explosive historical thriller

Emma Donoghue’s well-judged pacing in 'The Paris Express' has created an enthralling, suspenseful read

Emma Donoghue’s excellent research sheds new light on the social history of France. Picture: Woodgate Photography

• The Paris Express 
• Emma Donoghue 
• Picador, €16.99 

The first chapter of this gripping thriller opens with a fitting epigraph from the poet Edna St Vincent Millay: “There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going.”

Train buffs will love the wealth of technical detail, while the predicaments and interactions of the passengers provide compelling human interest. 

Set on board the Granville-Paris Express on October 22, 1895, Donoghue profiles both passengers and crew, from the engine driver and his stoker (who have an unusually close relationship), to the wealthy, pampered occupants of first class carriages as they travel the seven hours and 10 minutes that it will take the steam train to get from the Normandy coast to Montparnasse Station in the City of Light.

Engine 721, always referred to as “she”, is a character in her own right, both respected and feared by her crew. 

Fatalities and mutilations among the sooty-faced rail workers are a fact of life, and they are 10 times more likely to be killed than civilians.

When Engine 721 was once halted in a tunnel for 10 minutes, pent-up fumes asphyxiated the driver and stoker: 

She never meant them any harm; this is simply how she was made.

Back in 1895, French railway stations had two times. The outside clock ran five minutes faster than the inside one, to encourage dawdlers to hurry up. So every train in France ran five minutes’ late, known as “inside time” until a reform in 1911.

One of the last to board is Mado Pelletier, “stocky, plain, and 21, in her collar, tie and boxy skirt”, a style known as “á l’androgyne”. 

Her impoverished upbringing in a room behind a greengrocery has led her to become an anarchist. In her metal lunchbox she has a home-made bomb.

Thanks to the continental habit of talking to strangers on trains, we learn much about the passengers in first, second and third class — the latter featuring plain wooden benches with no backs, in contrast to the “plump red velvet banquettes” of first class.

Mado sees the train as “a moving image of the unfairness of the living conditions of life”.

At each of the train’s five halting places, “a score of passengers hop off with the constrained gait of people in urgent search of a latrine”.

There is no corridor between the carriages, and no on-board “facilities”.

John Millington Synge is travelling third class with a couple of Jewish students and a cabaret artiste wearing a monkey.

A black American painter in first class is treated for a nose-bleed by a female scientist of Cuban origin, and a spark is lit.

A woman working for a Monsieur Gaumont has the idea of making “moving pictures” with his new invention and is granted permission.

A wise elderly Russian woman, Blonska, intuitively suspects Mado of carrying a bomb when she tries to ascertain which carriages the two parliamentary deputies aboard are travelling in.

We are constantly on tenterhooks wondering when she will set her bomb off. Another anxiety arises when a heavily pregnant woman goes into labour.

Even better than first class is having your own private carriage, and it is the coupling of one of these for a local politician that leads to the train approaching Paris nearly eight minutes behind schedule.

Guillaume, the driver, is tempted to push Engine 721 up to a faster speed than he should, hoping to shave four minutes off the missing eight.

I will not reveal the ending, though savvy railway enthusiasts will already have guessed.

Emma Donoghue’s excellent research sheds new light on the social history of France, while her well-judged pacing has created an enthralling, suspenseful read.

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