EMMA DONOGHUE The Paris Express.  Reviewed by Justine Ettler

The new novel from the author of Room and Akin delivers an Agatha Christie feel, a historical train derailment, and identity politics.

In the search for an original twist, some crime writers are turning to literary and experimental tropes like hybrid genres and multiple narrators. Best known for her bestseller, Room, Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, The Paris Express, is one such, crossing a real-life historical train derailment with a Murder on the Orient Express-style mystery.

In October 1895 an express train famously crashed through the barriers at Montparnasse station in Paris, miraculously only killing one person. The author of numerous historical novels, such as Frog Music and The Pull of the Stars, Donoghue uses the rail disaster as inspiration for her latest novel and depicts the derailment from multiple perspectives including a diverse range of genders, ages, classes and sexualities. Beginning with Mado, an angry young working-class woman, the story then cuts to the perspective of Maurice, a seven-year-old boy travelling alone, before moving onto Leon, the moustachioed train conductor. The book continues in this way, changing perspective every few pages until, roughly a quarter of the way through, the first twist in the story is revealed from Mado’s perspective, heightening suspense and establishing her as the novel’s protagonist.

With its numerous narrators and fragmented style, The Paris Express is reminiscent of Daniel Sweren-Becker’s Kill Show, a pseudo-documentary novel with 26 narrators, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which combines historical fiction with a documentary style. The Paris Express also recalls Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnit Murder on the Orient Express, though Donoghue ensures characters who were absent or silent in Christie’s plot are given a voice here. The similarity with Christie, however, is superficial, as The Paris Express is much less thriller and much more mystery, given the delay in the introduction of the threat of actual violence and remembering Patricia Highsmith’s definition of the thriller as a story, ‘in which the possibility of violent action, even death, is close all the time’. Luckily Donoghue’s talent for creating interesting and believable characters is sufficiently compelling to carry the story.

But Donoghue’s characterisation is unusual and she has included an explanation of her approach at the end of the novel. The Paris Express is peopled with three kinds of characters, all drawn from Donoghue’s original research. Actual real people who lived at the end of the nineteenth century, some famous like Monsieur Eiffel, who had just finished his Eiffel Tower, and some of them yet to be famous like Gauguin and the scientist Marie Curie. These knowing winks add colour, as is the case when Annah, a character based on one of Gauguin’s models, boasts about selling his belongings as revenge for mistreatment. Fellow third-class passenger, the Irish writer John Synge, finds her tale of female revenge amusing.

‘You sold the painter’s stuff while he was out of town?’

‘Axes, boomerangs, chairs, rugs, even the bed. Rooms look better. Bigger.’ Annah’s lit up with pleasure at the memory. ‘I can’t sell his pictures, though.’

‘No?’

‘Nobody will pay a sou for his stupid pictures.’

And John’s laughing too at the idea of this horrible painter opening the door and finding nothing left, no little brown girl, no bed, no weapons, nothing interrupting the gleaming expanse but his own canvases staring back at him.

The second type of character is ordinary real people who were actually on the train, such as the driver and stoker. The remaining characters are fictionalised but named after real people who could have been on the train.

Donoghue’s writing is at its best with the more invented characters such as Blonska, an elderly Russian hunchback who, while enjoying patronage by the Parisian upper class, passes the money she is given to those in greater need – which means Blonska frequently sleeps rough and does without meals. One way of bringing characters to life quickly is through telling details and Donoghue employs this technique to great effect, preventing her many and varied characters from descending into superficiality. ‘Blonska’s bones are sixty years old and felt more like a hundred.’

Mado is memorable not just for her telling details – she is ‘Stocky, plain, and twenty-one in her collar, tie, and boxy skirt’ – but for her fiercely held beliefs and opinions. Desperately poor but fashionably dressed, Mado’s wearing the latest Paris fashion of l’androgyne, her outfit bought not at a Parisian boutique, but at a flea market. In Mado’s case intense poverty combined with a lack of opportunities for women transforms her into a violent anarchist and devout feminist.

While some readers will yearn for more about their favourite characters, one of the pay-offs of multiple perspectives is the way the novel allows readers access to a real slice of fin de siècle life in France. Donoghue’s characters range from poor travellers who can barely afford the fare, to first class passengers with their endless demands, to those so wealthy they can afford to attach their own private carriage.

But there’s more to this novel than just a window into the past. References such as the one to Zola’s novel, La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast), which links bloodshed to the invention of the railways, suggest, at a symbolic level, that the train is the bomb. Steam trains perfectly embody the Industrial Revolution’s alliance between progressive capital and government, the ultimate crime against the poor from an anarchist perspective, which not only transformed society, but resulted in a widening of the gap between rich and poor.

While there isn’t much space to develop her characters, Donoghue’s The Paris Express successfully presents a slice-of-life account of the famous French train derailment. With its multiple narrators and documentary feel, it is a distinctive blend of crime fiction and history that maintains its slow-build suspense to the very end.

Emma Donoghue The Paris Express Picador 2025 PB 288pp $34.99

Justine Ettler is the author of three novels and has a PhD in English from the University of Sydney.

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Tags: Agatha Christie, Emma | Donoghue, Gauguin, historical fiction, Irish writers, John Synge, Montparnasse station, train derailment