“Why should you take an interest in this particular railway journey?” the narrator of Emma Donoghue’s new novel asks the reader. “[Why] care about this one express from Granville on the morning of the twenty-second of October, 1895?” Answer: it’s heading for tragedy. The fourth wall isn’t the only boundary about to break.
The Paris Express is the latest in Donoghue’s suite of historical novels, following Learned by Heart (2023) about lesbian lovers who meet at boarding school in 1805. I enjoy Donoghue’s contemporary work, including bestseller Room, where she also writes about outsiders. But her historical fiction holds a special place in my heart for its resurrection of the weirdos and gays – my people – whom history tried to erase.
The novel opens as we board the train alongside Mado Pelletier: “stocky, plain, and twenty-one”, and a staunch anarchist. A Parisian raised in a grocery shop where she was allowed to eat only the bruised and rotting fruit, she has travelled west to the Normandy coast and is now about to take the opposite train back to the capital. She wanted to see the sea for once in her life. Another, more explosive purpose for her round trip unfolds as the express nears Paris.
Mado shares the train with fellow passengers and crew spread across first, second and third class. A seven-year-old boy is travelling alone – “seven and a half years”, he specifies with juvenile precision. The driver and stoker, Pellerin and Garnier, work and bunk together away from their wives. Blonska, a 60-year-old Russian, serves as a practical socialist foil to Mado’s all-or-nothing mindset and is the first to suspect her secret plan. There’s even a peasant woman with a cone-shaped head who has wrapped her baby’s skull to grow the same way. This detail sent me down an internet rabbit hole about 19th century cranial modification.
Almost any character could trigger such research tangents. Real historical aristocrats, agitators and artists abound. Playwright JM Synge, poet and artist Max Jacob and Gauguin’s teenaged model Annah share a third-class carriage. In second class, nerve impulse researcher Marcelle de Heredia and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner bond over their experiences as people of colour. And I won’t spoil anything but yes, there are gay characters. Donoghue is not a timid custodian of the past but an excavator, digging beneath bromides to unearth the defiant truth. The Paris Express is no exception.
One forgivable disappointment is that Donoghue can’t showcase her knack for sumptuously immersive English-language historical idioms through characters who are supposed to be speaking French
It takes artistic discipline to weave social issues into a novel without turning the characters into mouthpieces. A certain kind of liberal humanist might consider Mado’s reflections too on-the-nose: “This train is a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.” But this is exactly how Mado would think. It would betray the character if Donoghue cleaved to the stuffy maxim that a novel can contain nothing overtly political – a view itself deeply political in its insistence on presenting the status quo as neutral.
The narrator flexibly roams through different heads, not all of whom share Mado’s revolutionary fervour. A factory owner “is wary of talking politics with his wife’s friend, who thinks an arch tone makes up for her ignorance” when she challenges his banning of workers from unionising. Donoghue lets him rant. She grants everyone, if not quite sympathy, then certainly a voice.
[ Emma Donoghue: The lockdown lessons I learned from writing RoomOpens in new window ]
Far more chilling than Mado’s reckless anger is the logical voice of the train herself. One of the novel’s many close third-person narrators, she reflects on her tendency to occasionally mangle railwaymen: “this is simply how she was made.” Donoghue understands the Industrial Revolution not as the dastardly scheme of nefarious individuals but as the mechanical march of social forces. Human decisions play some part – her characters are not without agency – but the train conveys them towards disaster with a surety that is all she knows. (I did pause to wonder why le train is gendered female, but if I’m suspending disbelief about a train talking to me in the first place ...)
On that note, one forgivable disappointment is that Donoghue can’t showcase her knack for sumptuously immersive English-language historical idioms through characters who are supposed to be speaking French. The two characters who actually think through English hew more closely to the parlance of the time (“[c]raven chicken-heart”), while the French-reported-through-English is more of a free-for-all: “try persuading the crazies”, “so awkward”. This is likely a deliberate reminder that everything is being translated.
As it happens, I’m writing this review on the train from Dublin to Belfast. I’m glad I had the book finished before I boarded; Donoghue’s suspenseful allusions to railway accidents would not have paired well with Iarnród Éireann’s rumblings. Would you believe the train is pulling in just as I round off this paragraph? I’ve emerged from my journey unscathed. As for Donoghue’s characters, you’ll have to read the book.
