Book Review: The Paris Express

 By Emma Donoghue

• 
  Pub Date: 2025 
  

• Genre: Historical Fiction 

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: It has maps on the front and rear endpapers 

• Bookmark used: Books are Freedom, Roebling Books

******

    A tantalizing tale that uses an impending disaster to tell the stories of the lives aboard a train traveling through the French countryside between Granville and Paris in 1895.

    It employs fictional characters to make lives real, and real people to enhance the drama and tension on board. Told at a time when train travel was new and steam trains were an exciting adventure, it explores the marvels of science coming to life, with all its novelty, tedium, and danger.

    Donoghue hews close to the historical record when it suits her, borrowing the names and known characteristics of such people as the engineer,¹ the conductor,² and other train personnel, but altering or inventing their actions, discussions, and personal lives. She follows the story of the train as it speeds through the countryside, trying to make up time lost on stops along the way. Its crash into the Paris-Montparnasse Station is well documented, and Donoghue took full advantage of the pictures and stories from the incident.

From the book jacket

    Thusly, appearing in the book are redrawn characters on the train from France, Ireland, the United States, Russia, and Algeria. Included are the unknown, along with such famous people as the Irish playwright John Synge³ (who could have been aboard the train because he was living in Paris at the time); Alice Guy⁴, a pioneer in early film-making, sometimes called the Mother of Cinema), a woman giving birth; and the American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner⁵, the son of a slave who spent most of his career in France.

    Perhaps the most intriguing of the characters, arguably the protagonist, is 21-year-old Madeleine Pelletier, a fiery anarchist who is dying to make her mark on the world. Nicknamed Mado in the book, she is known in French history as an unconventional woman who insisted on wearing trousers, studied as a psychiatrist, worked as a doctor, performed abortions, started a suffragist journal, and smashed windows. On the train, she contemplates making a bomb and blowing up everything, and is thrilled when she learns a number of politicians may be onboard, which will enhance her actions.

    Yes, this is somewhat of a political book. But more than that, Donoghue tells of people, ordinary and extraordinary, as they embark on a journey to the start of the 20th Century and ponder their lives and the direction of their country nearing the end of what is called "the long 19th Century" -- starting with a revolution and ending with a world war.

    Poverty and wealth, the speed of modern life, and the changes in the countryside as the city of Paris takes center stage are discussed in the first-class cabins, the second-class coaches, and the crowded third-class cattle cars.

    When I first finished the book, I sort of agreed with a reviewer who called it scattered with too many characters to keep track of. 

It rather feels as commotion ... making it hard to keep track (of) who is who and get attached to any character with brief stories among such (a) large cast of characters.

    But then I thought, isn't that the point? Here's a time in history when so much is happening that some people get lost in the shuffle.

    In her author's note, Donoghue tells us the conductor² died a year later, at the the age of 43, as did an 18-year-old girl⁶ who had been sick on the train of a then-unknown disease. Meanwhile, a Paris city engineer, briefly mentioned in the tale, saw his "audacious plan ... to build Paris an underground rail system" adopted a year later and open at the turn of the century. It is now one of the largest and busiest subways in the world.

    Donoghue is at her best here, using a specific time and place to reveal the hopes, dreams, and anonymity of everyday life. 

------------------------------------------

¹ Guillaume Pellerin

² Léon Mariette

³ J.M. Synge, whose most famous play is The Playboy of the Western World, also was a poet and figure in the Irish literary revival of the time

⁴ Including The Fairy of the Cabbages in 1896

⁵ He discusses his work, including The Resurrection of Lazarus, while on the train

⁶ Jeanne Sarazin-Levassor, of whom little else is known, although her parents were instrumental in early automotive history