Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express tracks fateful journey
Acclaimed writer will visit Hamilton to talk about her new work of historical fiction at a pre-festival gritLIT event at the Playhouse Cinema on April 9.
Acclaimed author Emma Donoghue loves the time immediately after releasing a new book, when she tours to give readings and speak at literary festivals. But she also has a habit of mentally preparing herself for critical reviews.
“I'm very extroverted. So I love the social aspects of the book promotion events. And then when the festivals are on and you meet other Canadian authors, we'll get to hang out in the green room. There’s fantastic solidarity among Canadian authors,” says the Dublin-born writer who has just released her 16th book The Paris Express.
In it, Donoghue follows a disaster-bound train on its seven-hour journey on Oct. 22, 1895 from Granville, on the Normandy coast, 325 kilometres away to Paris.
When HAMILTON CITY Magazine gets Donoghue on the phone, she’s fresh into Milwaukee after flying in from Atlanta. She’s been on tour in the United States for two weeks.
To cope with the nerves that come just before a new book goes public, Donoghue entertains her wife with made up headlines.
“You know, I'll come into dinner and I'll say: ‘Donoghue’s tale runs out of steam’ or, ‘Train wreck: Donoghue unwisely takes on story of train crash.’”
The reception for The Paris Express did not require any such nervousness. It’s already hit No. 1 on the Canadian fiction bestseller list and reviewers have offered widespread praise.
“I feel really treasured by my Canadian readers in particular and once I start doing events, I'm not nervous anymore. I like talking to readers and hearing questions and engaging in discussions with them. It just reminds me that writing a book actually is a kind of a meeting of minds,” says Donoghue, 55, who lives in London, Ont. with her family.
Donoghue will meet with her local readers at a pre-festival event for gritLIT at the Playhouse Cinema on April 9.
The Paris Express is the tale of a locomotive that crashed through the wall of the Montparnasse train station in the French capital before nosediving to the street below. The surreal and shocking photos of the disaster were published around the world.
When Donoghue’s wife, Chris Roulston, a professor of French studies at Western University, was taking a leave in Paris for a year in 2022, Donoghue was looking for a place to live with their two kids, now ages 17 and 21.
She found an apartment in Montparnasse and in researching the neighbourhood, found the famous photographs of the crash. She had never seen them before and was immediately captivated by the story of the disaster.
“I've noticed for a few years when I hear about disasters, I have been kind of having a look at each one, thinking, oh, that could be an interesting novel. It’s a big group of people all with nothing in common. They are total strangers brought together by the fact that something went wrong that day when they were all travelling together.”
Though the images of the derailment are spectacular, no one on the train or in the station were killed. The sole fatality was a woman selling newspapers on the sidewalk who was struck by debris.
“The other thing that fascinated me about this crash is that it wasn't struck by lightning or anything. It happened because they were running 10 minutes late, right? And you know, I'm coming from Ireland, there was never a bus that was on time when I was young. But in 1890s Paris, it was unacceptable to run 10 minutes late, and that the driver would literally risk the lives of everyone on board by trying to make up those 10 minutes, I found it such a poignant story.”
In fact, the wages of train crews were tied up in punctuality, so the incentive was there to unsafely push the train.
“It struck me as a little parable about speed. We all want convenience and speed, and you know, progress and growth, and that capitalist storyline of everything, faster, sooner, bigger.”
The novel required enormous amounts of research, into the characters and into the workings of steam trains of the era.
“Believe me, there were moments I was in a cold sweat trying to understand which way the pistons would go,” she laughs.
Donoghue did deep dives into records from the crash’s inquiry, which revealed many details about the four-man crew. News reports contained information about passengers in first class. From there, she found a cast of characters to populate the train, real-life people who could have been on the train that day.
Paris at the end of the 19th century was a world hub for artists, scientists, inventors, and writers, and anyone looking for a glamorous cosmopolitan life. So on Engine 721, we find an Algerian coffee seller, a Cambodian student, an African-American painter, an Irish playwright, and an elderly Russian immigrant.
The novel presented interesting challenges for Donoghue. Its 284 pages happen over the span of just seven hours, and the book is populated with many characters, spread out over the first-, second- and third-class cars. (Third-class was stationed just behind the locomotive because, as Donoghue notes, the occupants were meant to absorb both the coal dust clouds emanating from the constant feeding of the furnaces and the impact of any crash.)
“I think I've usually had maybe one or three point-of-view characters. This one, I'm not actually sure how many there are. It's probably in the teens, certainly. But a novel set on a train is about, by definition, a big group of people. You know, it's all about mass transit and varied people being brought together by the vehicle they're travelling on. And so I thought it had to be a group novel.”
The Paris Express is populated with characters pointing to the future – an engineer who will become the architect of the future Metro in Paris, an important female medical researcher who will break down barriers, and an early adopter of the motor car. There is also the young woman who sees the potential of “moving pictures” even when her dim boss does not. She will go on to be known as the Mother of Cinema.
“They are really excited by all the different new technologies of speed, you know, like typewriters and bicycles and cars and moving pictures. They're thrilled about what the whole kind of age of electricity would bring. But of course, they're aware that it's all going very fast.”
That’s a theme that resonates today, echoed in artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, deepfakes, and cybercrime.
But Donoghue says she never consciously searches for the contemporary connections to her historical fiction.
“If you're someone who pays any attention to the world you live in, then when you write about the past, you're going to ask certain questions of it. You're going to notice certain similarities or differences. The two eras will kind of rhyme. I find that happens just really naturally. And I never have an agenda. I'm never like saying, ‘Oh, I will tell you how it was in the 1890s in order to teach a lesson.’”
In a comprehensive author’s note at the conclusion of the book, Donoghue explains the fates of the real-life characters in The Paris Express. She found these people because they did extraordinary and dramatic things in their lives.
Chief among her imagined passengers is Mado Pelletier, an androgynous anarchist who has plenty of targets for her anger – capitalists, politicians, religion, and employers – about the unfair and brutal world in which she lives. She sees the cross-section of her enemies in the first-class cars of Engine 721 and intends to make a big statement with a homemade bomb in her lunch kit.
“One of the things I love about writing about people in the distant past is that our contemporary labels don't fit them. So, here’s this woman who became notorious for wearing men's clothes, but it does not seem at all that she thought of herself as a man or wanted to be a man. It doesn't even seem that she wanted to be with a woman, because, you know, in her circles, there were plenty of lesbians, and she wasn't one of them. It honestly seems to have been a protest. She was like, women are not free, and until we are, I'm not going to wear a damn skirt. So she was an absolutely furious feminist and radical who was just eaten up with rage towards the church, the government, the capitalists. And, you know, I love what a fighter she was.”
Donoghue is a writer across multiple genres, from theatre to screenplays and short stories to novels. The breadth of what she does means there is never a chance that she’ll get bored and there is no such thing as a typical writing day.
But she doesn’t worry about regimenting her practice.
“I think writers only need to make a rule about how many hours a day or how many pages they'll get written if they find the writing really hard. And I don't, I love the writing so much.”
She started her first novel at 19 and has never had another job. Her longest break has been six weeks when each of her children were born.
But working in theatre – her latest script is for a musical about Irish immigrants called Wind Coming Over the Sea that will debut at the Blythe Festival Theatre in June – brings a level of camaraderie that is missing when writing books.
“There’s a fluid and collaborative aspect to theatre that is just thrilling and you have such laughs. And I always think this is so much fun. Why do I ever write alone?”
Donoghue’s previous novels include Room, The Wonder, Frog Music, Slammerkin, and The Pull of Stars. Room, a 2010 novel written from the perspective of a child raised in a single room by his captive other, was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes and has sold almost three million copies.
It then became a critically acclaimed movie and Donoghue was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay. A theatrical version had productions in England, Scotland and Ireland in 2017 and Canada in 2022.
The Wonder was also adapted into a movie and The Pull of the Stars, a 1918 pandemic-era novel written before COVID-19,debuted at the Gate Theatre in Dublin last year.
Her film scripts also include H is for Hawk, an upcoming adaption of a 2014 memoir by Helen MacDonald that stars Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson.
Emma Donoghue will sit down with CHCH Morning Live’s Annette Hamm in a pre-festival gritLIT event on Wednesday, April 9, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., Playhouse Cinema, 177 Sherman Ave. N., Hamilton. Tickets are here.
