Review: Vivien Horler

The Paris Express, by Emma Donoghue (Picador)

It’s autumn 1895 in France, where a level of anarchy has broken out, spreading anxiety across the land.

On the Paris Express from Granville in Normandy to Paris, the elderly Russian seamstress Blonsky, who’s seen a thing or two in her time, has become suspicious of the sturdy young woman sitting next to her.

Around noon everyone in third class has opened their lunch, except the young woman, who is still clutching her lunch bucket protectively. Blonska asks her why she’s not eating, and she says she’s not hungry.

Blonska thinks that’s odd.

But we gradually understand that the young woman, Mado Pelletier, who grew up in poverty and believes society has to be destroyed before a better one can emerge, is not carrying bread, cheese and sausage in her lunch bucket – its contents are considerably more lethal.

She knows parliamentary deputies will be heading back to Paris today, and maybe a couple will be on the train. Then her gesture – well, her act of annihilation – will have more resonance.

But there are a lot of other people on the train, and we learn something of their histories. There’s seven-year-old Maurice, travelling on his own for the first time, there is the man Gaumont, who is travelling with a large, cumbersome camera, there’s the young black American artist who has come to France to paint, the young cabaret artist and artist’s model whose life seems to be going nowhere, a deputy who was actually in the Chamber of Deputies when Auguste Vaillant’s bomb exploded there in 1893, there is the young neurophysiologist  who is pretty sure a fellow passenger has leukaemia…

And then there are the train crew, the driver, the stoker, and three guards. We learn about their home lives, their devotion to the mechanics of the train which carries people faster than they’ve ever gone in history.

We worry about all the lives Mado intends to destroy, including her own.

But what they don’t know – and we do because this is a historical novel based on fact, and some of the people on the train are historical figures, including little Maurice – is that the train, pulled by Engine 721, has another fate in store.

This novel, by the Irish-born author of Room, shortlisted for the Booker, and The Wonder, both of which have been turned into films, is thoroughly readable, and in the words of one reviewer, “an edge-of-your-seat historical thriller”. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I enjoyed it greatly.

• The Paris Express was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for June.