(Note: This is another case where the book cover on Goodreads isn’t the same as the Canadian cover online, so I’ve got the Canadian version on the home page and what I presume is the American one here, with my Goodreads review.)
The Paris Express by Emma DonoghueMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Author Emma Donoghue likes to experiment with storytelling. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as it did in Room, which is one of the rare books I actually give 5 stars to. She told the story through the eyes of a 5-year-old boy who has never experienced the world outside of the one small room where his mother was held captive, abused, and bore him. The book was breathtaking in its ability to convey the naivity of the boy and the pain yet determination of his young mother. In Donoghue’s latest book, The Paris Express, she again diverts from the standard approach. There was a lot I liked about this book, but I don’t think it pulled its challenge off as superbly as Room did.
The Paris Express tells the story of an actual French train disaster in 1895. As the train rumbles along the tracks from Normandy towards Paris we are taken inside the heads of more than a dozen passengers. Since the trains had three classes of carriages, we get to meet and see how people — from those who could barely afford a 3rd class ticket up to those who had their own private train cars — thought and travelled. Donoghue does a beautiful job of putting you in their worlds, with the smells, crowding, irritations and conversations that train travel tossed together. I loved that aspect of the book.
One of the characters is Mado, a young, female (though she’d have preferred to be male) revolutionary. We soon discover that she’s carrying a bomb, and as the novel hurtles towards its surprise ending, we wonder when the bomb will go off. I loved the irony of the twist at the end.
What worked less well for me, as someone who was listening to it on an audiobook, was the sheer number of characters. It got difficult to keep track of them all. Maybe that would have been less of an issue if I’d been reading instead of listening, although comments by other readers suggest I’m not alone. The challenge isn’t just that there are so many characters, it’s that it becomes difficult to get and stay invested in their stories, because few of them carry though long enough to have a full story arc. For much of the book I kept expecting the characters’ stories to all intersect somehow, but they don’t, apart from the fact that they all went through the same train ride.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book, and if you like historical fiction from turn of the 19th century Europe, you may well too.
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