Train & Terrain: The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

Hospitals, trains, prisons, cemeteries – these are some of the spaces Michel Foucault identifies as heterotopia or other places, liminal arenas that lie outside of normative dwellings. Emma Donoghue has used a hospital setting in her novel, The Pull of the Stars (2020), which deals with the 1918 pandemic in Dublin. In her latest novel, The Paris Express, a French train in 1895 becomes the focal point for historic exploration of a world within a world that upsets normal spaces.

Donoghue’s journey from Granville in the north of France to Paris combines fact and fiction: some of the characters were actually on that train that crashed into the Montparnasse Station, others are actual people who were alive at the time but not on board, while a few are pure invention. From 8:30 a.m. when the passengers embark in Granville to 4:00 p.m. when they arrive in Paris, we follow the impressions of a cast of characters divided into first-, second-, and third-class compartments. More than a day trip, the novel explores fin-de-siècle culture and politics, the passage of time itself, French expression, and scientific progress between Paris and a wider world.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph, as if epigraphs themselves were passengers on the nineteenth-century train. The first is from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Travel”: “There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.” Donoghue sets the opening scene: “Half past eight in the morning, on the twenty-second of October, 1895, in Granville, on the Normand coast.” The first character she introduces is a radical feminist intent on blowing up the train: “Stocky, plain, and twenty-one, in her collar, tie, and boxy skirt, Mado Pelletier stands across the street from the little railway station holding her lidded metal lunch bucket, watching.” Boxy skirt and lunch bucket are almost interchangeable, for her lunch contains the bomb that is never detonated, but keeps the reader and fellow travellers on edge during the journey. Donaghue’s plot foils Mado’s plot as the latter has a change of heart, delivering a baby instead of a bomb. In a novel concerned with watching, Mado is not the only train or time watcher.

The novelist watches her characters with adjectives: Mado is stocky, plain, but she is also “sooty and bone-jarred” from her previous journey from Paris to Granville the day before. She travels to Granville “because it’s the end of the line” in anticipation of what she expects to be her own dead end. The first section ends with Mado identifying with Joan of Arc: “The Maid of Orléans would be on the blasted train by now. Get moving – unless you mean to miss it?” Blasted foreshadows the train’s fate, while “miss” alludes to her failed opportunity.

The narrator shifts to a second character, Maurice Marland, in the next section, though the young boy has been mentioned in the first section where he is motionless at Mado’s side. “Frowning, Maurice Marland looks up at the clock over the station entrance.” Donoghue’s turn-of-the-century timeline is matched by minutes on this clock and on the train’s schedule at each stop. “The clock shows just past 8:40, the longer hand stabbing the V of the VIII.” With exact precision, The Paris Express stabs time, but also space in the piercing of Montparnasse. The clock outside the station differs from the one inside by five minutes in order to accommodate “dawdlers”: “When a train takes off, do its crew and passengers somehow stay on this inner time, moving along in an enchanted bubble of five-minutes behind?” Donoghue’s inner train is an enchanted bubble that wends its way across France at various speeds and moods of modernity. “So the clocks should all tell true” – like a reliable narrator who oversees classes and compartments in a timeless express.

Maurice studies the posters in the station “as if he’s enclosed in a book, a sturdy volume with the power to carry these people all the way to Paris.” Young Maurice and each of the other adult characters are enclosed in the train and in the sturdy irony of The Paris Express. Another station sign reads: “Banish Monotony and Ennui,” and Maurice ponders the word “banish,” which resonates later in the novel when the Dreyfus Affair is mentioned. He is also reading Around the World in Eighty Days, which serves as additional commentary on the approximately eight-hour duration of this novel. Always in motion, Maurice’s section ends with another character, the foreigner who serves coffee: “He’s a human coffeepot!” – a source of steam within the steaming train and station. “An extraordinary tank on the man’s back wobbles high above his brimless cap, with … could that be steam leaking out the top?” In Dickensian fashion, Donoghue dresses her characters in memorable details, metonymies of caricature and atmosphere that crowd her canvas.

Jean Le Goff enters the next section, looking out for passengers’ comfort and tips. “Not yet thirty, he keeps the points of his great handlebar waxed, hoping the combination of peaked cap, pipe, and moustache will add a few years.” He handles his moustache as deftly as the passengers’ luggage, while work on the train will inevitably subtract years from his life. He opens the green door of Front First to usher in a gentleman with a wooden arm and a family of three with a cocker spaniel in the comfort of plump and velvet banquettes. He positions himself in Rear Baggage, where the junior guard always rides as if ready for any danger from behind.

From rear to front of train where driver Guillaume Pellerin takes his position beside his stoker, Victor Garnier. Engine 721 pulls three Third-Class carriages, two First, two Seconds, and a couple of baggage vans. Donoghue’s kaleidoscope shifts to the elderly Russian émigrée Blonska, and the discomforts of Third Class – long wooden benches, holes in the floor, and air thick with tobacco, garlic, and whiskey. She reads Chekhov’s latest stories, part of a larger library within The Paris Express. Amidst all the bustle and whistle blowing in the station, the narrator reminds us of a different timetable: “You can’t cheat the hourglass; the sand will run out whether you’re watching or not.” Despite the watchful eyes of passengers, crew, and narrator, fate intervenes in unexpected ways of train spotting and plotting. (In real life, deformed Blonska died in a warehouse fire in 1897, her charred body identified by her orthopaedic corset.)

The next section shifts to senior guard, Léon Mariette. A careful workman, he thinks of the railways as a hard school in which the least slip can kill an innocent person. “A stage upon which character is revealed in a merciless light.” Donoghue’s lighting effects and dramatic sensibility plot these characters in her novel. Léon travels the length of the train, checking every detail for safety, as the novelist engineers her prose. “The smokebox is like a great clock with no hands” – timeless in stillness and motion. Like the omniscient narrator settling all of these characters in their places, Léon has the most comprehensive view of train and track from his birdcage. A parenthetic remark presents some of his army background, which comments on the nature of European progress: “(As it was peacetime, he was mostly assigned to protect railway lines in West Africa – keeping order as civilization advanced across the continent one kilometer at a time.)” Preventing a clash of continents, he is also responsible for the train’s brakes, adjusting speeds as each kilometer goes by.

The final section of the first chapter begins with “Moving at last!” Technically, this train is Engine 721, but the crew refer to her as “she” to mark the distinction between genders. “From the tip of Normandy, she cuts due east, like a spoon taking the tip off the lightly boiled egg of France.” This simile is not merely a domestic or boiler-room comparison; instead, it also picks up the earlier routine between Guillaume and Victor who crack four eggs to test the fire’s heat: “How they crackle!” in Donoghue’s layered choreography where passengers pay nine francs to squeeze into third class, eighteen for second, or twenty-seven for the luxury of first class. The narrator asks readers why they should take an interest in this particular railway journey. The answer: “What’s remarkable about this train is that she’s headed straight for disaster.” The other answer is that Donoghue delights at every stop on the way where “Hours are time’s arrows, and one of them is fletched with death.” The Paris Express is larger than life and death.

The train departs Granville at 8:45 with an epigraph from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “From a Railway Carriage,” (1885) for much of the freight on the Paris Express is literary. The first of the two Second-Class carriages at the rear of the train has just one occupant, Henry Tanner, the American painter. “Granville Station reminded Henry of Monet’s dozen canvases of Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare – like landscapes but indoors, with smoke and steam for clouds, diffusing the light that beams through the glass roof.” Donoghue paints an impressionistic phenomenology of trains, their motion in time and space filtered through an artist’s consciousness and atmosphere. In her portrait she acknowledges “that it’s not easy to portray the passing of time in a picture.” For perspective she dips further into history: “The old masters relied on symbolism (sundials, hourglasses, snuffed candles, and skulls) or personification – old Father Time in his silver beard.” Donoghue’s narrative has its own hourglass through France to give “a sense of the fleeting.” Engine 721 is solid yet fleeting from Granville to Montparnasse.

Although Henry could afford to travel in First Class, he feels more comfortable in Second because of his colour, which allows Donoghue to compare racial distinctions in the United States and France. “If Henry were riding a train south from New York, say, then when he reached Washington, DC, he’d be forced to change to the small Coloured car that reeks of the conductors’ urine.” He stares out the window to distract himself from the turmoil of self-consciousness, as the novelist portrays colours of skin and landscape (with a nod to Leonard Cohen): “Telegraph poles along the track, birds on the wires like notes in a musical score.” The narrator tracks the otherness of character and place: “A small, walled-off cemetery, the ghetto of the dead.” The cemetery is one example of Foucault’s heterotopia, the ghetto a racialized prison of the “other place.”

Speed contributes to the painter’s Impressionistic sensibility: “That’s the paradox of trains, he supposes; they show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.” The narrative shunts between the passing landscape and Henry’s personal history in Philadelphia where his art teachers discriminated against the “mulatto boy.” Eventually a more sympathetic teacher opens the art world to him. Henry looks out of the window for picturesque scenes, but in the back of his head his father’s words bother him: “Art is a profession of vagabonds.” He thinks about his painting, “Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” facing the wall in his Paris studio: “He wants to show time stopping as the prophet’s voice gentles the beasts.” Parallel artistic tracks pervade the novel as the writer paints between gentle and beastly cages, lines and lions: “the prophet didn’t rail or fight the lions but sat down and prayed.” Rail as voice or line in “a rectangle of honeyed evening light sliding into the prison from a high window.” Like the train, prison is a heterotopia for dream and drama.

The drama continues in Middle Third carriage where Irish playwright John Millington Synge makes notes. This young Dubliner sketches impressions, beginning with the coffee seller: “Balancing on the shaking boards between the benches like a circus equestrian, a coffee seller – North African, John would guess – has a towering tank strapped tightly to his back.” The circus motif crops up at different stages of the journey, adding to the carnivalesque atmosphere of characters and classes in various carriages. Indeed, Engine 721 is a microcosm of the metropolis where so many backgrounds converge in a cosmopolitan novel. John enjoys all forms of movement: “The scenes briefly framed in the window form a continuous, unpredictable drama of happenstance. And inside the carriage, too, it’s all go, especially when a train’s chockablock.” Along with Henry Tanner in another carriage, he studies colourful characters.

Max Jacob travels in the same compartment as John Synge, and the two writers strike up a conversation. Jacob remarks ironically that he has been trained at “the Colonial School by the Jardin de Luxembourg to tyrannize over far-flung regions of the empire.” Gay and Jewish, he is hardly in a position to advocate for imperialism; instead, his family is in the clothing business, the only Jews in Quimper. “Since the banishment of Captain Dreyfus for espionage, in April, it’s a brave Hebrew who identifies himself as such.” Donoghue’s sympathies are with Emile Zola’s “j’accuse” in the Dreyfus Affair. Amongst these outsiders, Synge is also an outsider: “Not a boulevardier seen at parties, so much as a flaneur who wanders past and hears their distant music.” The Paris Express is a flaneur of the French countryside, gathering steam and stories.

When the narrator turns her attention to First Class, she comments: “A railway carriage is as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.” Without a single protagonist, the novel rides the rails with a random assembly of dramatis personae. Marcelle de Heredia is one of the passengers in First Class, having climbed the ladder from her Cuban roots with her research in neurology. “You wonder how a train can read her passengers’ minds?” and the novel answers that question.

Donoghue places Léon Gaumont and his secretary Alice Guy in Second Class to explore the cinematic aspects of train travel, as settings flash through the minds of characters. (Gaumont and Company, the oldest extant film company in the world, was founded in 1895, and Alice Guy wrote, directed, and produced hundreds of films.) Alice reads: “For now Alice buries herself in her novel, one of Zola’s,” foreshadowing a burial at the end. “Generally she enjoys stories about the railways – lovers just missing assignations or hurling themselves under the wheels. But this Zola book is verging on ludicrous, since virtually every character who sets eyes on a train seems to be driven to bloodshed as a result.” Since trains and photography overlap in the nineteenth century, the novel concludes fittingly with a young photographer capturing the crash at Montparnasse: “A sight as comical as it is apocalyptic, something out of a bad dream, as if Montparnasse Station has vomited out a train.” The photographer retches, and “takes the shot.” Active vs. passive: to shoot or be shot; to be inoculated against a pandemic or other ills of society, or to succumb to fate; to be Mado the anarchist, or to defuse her bomb and deliver babies.

Teeming and teaming with characters and cultures, Donoghue’s Baedeker turns pages and centuries, keeping the reader guessing about the train’s fate, which hurtles through an unexpected time-bomb. Through the grit and grain of cinder and smoke, she films her fin de siècle in noir and technicolour – a kaleidoscopic lens of naturalism and post-Impressionism. Take Donoghue’s train anywhere, any time.

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About the Author

Emma Donoghue is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Room sold almost three million copies, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Wonder was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue co-wrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperAvenue

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 18 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1443474231

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1443474238