Canadian Writers Abroad

Review of The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2025.
Reviewed by Wayne Grady.

“No one wants to read a novel that takes place in a long-term-care facility,” a wise writer friend once told me when I mentioned I was working on a novel that took place in a long-term-care facility, “because they already know how it will end.” The same may be said about a novel that takes place on a train that we know is going to crash catastrophically at the end of its run. In both cases, the journey has to be made more interesting than the destination. That shouldn’t be difficult, since as far as we know life generally is more interesting than death, but it often is.

Just after 4 p.m. on October 22, 1895, the Granville-to-Paris locomotive smashed through its buffer stop in Paris’s Gare Montparnasse, crashed through the station’s 60-centimetre masonry wall, and dropped 10 metres into the Place de Pennes plaza. The train had been running late, the engineer was speeding to make up the time, and the train guard was slow in applying the emergency brake. It was one of the most devastating train wrecks of the century, made headlines around the world, and no doubt is still talked about in the cafés and bistros of Montparnasse.

History tells us that none of the train’s 131 passengers and crew was seriously injured. The only fatality was that of a woman named Marie-Angelique Aguillard, who was operating a newsstand in the plaza at the time and was crushed by falling debris – making the Granville-Paris catastrophe the most dramatic case of killing the messenger since the King of Armenia had a courier beheaded for bringing him the news that the Roman army was advancing on his border.

There is no passenger list for the actual train, and that allows Donoghue to fill the wagons-lit with fictional passengers from all rungs of the social ladder as it existed in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the crew members are known: one was the train’s engineer, Guillaume-Marie Pellerin, a 19-year veteran with the company who, after the crash, was imprisoned for two months for careless driving; another was Victor Garnier, the train’s fireman, who is also in the novel. But Donoghue places real people on the train for whom there is no evidence of their having been passengers. The Black American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, for example, who was studying in Paris at the time and who, in 1895, completed his best-known work, Daniel in the Lion’s Den; Max Jacob, a painter with anarchist leanings and later a friend of Picasso’s; and John Millington Synge, the Irish playwright who was also living in Paris, and who in 1907 would write The Playboy of the Western World. The addition of these and other real-life characters gives Donoghue a lot to write about. For example, Jacob was a French Jew in the days after the celebrated Dreyfus Affair, when as Donoghue writes, it was “a brave Hebrew who identifies himself as such in public.” With her novelistic skill she also gives dimensions to characters about whose personalities nothing is known – the fireman Victor Garnier, for example, is adept at heaving shovelfuls of coal into the train’s firebox “without dropping a crumb, missing his mate by a hair, all the while hauling open the firebox door with his left clog.”

The journey is given added intrigue by the addition of a few fictional characters. A young boy returning from Granville, a fisherwoman with “a startlingly intricate strip of Bayeux lace over her muscular shoulders,” and a determined anarchist with a homemade bomb in her lunchpail. The third volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital had been published in Germany in 1894, and anti-bourgeois sentiment was high in France: a young dynamitard named Émile Henry had been guillotined at the Grande Roquette prison in May 1894 for detonating a bomb in the Gare Saint-Lazaire in February. Donoghue’s passenger, Mado Pelletier, had attended his execution, and when Henry “shouted Vive l’anarchie! Across a hundred metres his beautiful dark eyes locked onto Mado’s.” Even though we know Pelletier’s bomb did not go off, we read on wanting to know why not.

Donoghue seems to like writing about tense situations in tightly confined spaces. In The Paris Express she describes a train car as “a velvet, teak, and iron cigar box.” And her earlier novel, Room, is narrated by five-year-old Jack who, with his mother, has been imprisoned since birth in a small outbuilding behind the house of his captor, “Old Nick.” Both novels were inspired by real events; Room by the so-called Fritzl case in Austria, where Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elizabeth in a dungeon under his house for 24 years. And both focus on what goes on in the confined area leading up to the final dénouement. The Paris Express feels less claustrophobic than Room, and is far less tragic (except for Marie-Angelique Aguillard), but there is a similar tension between the story in the box, as it were, and what we know about what was going on outside the box. It’s this flirtation with nonfiction that gives Donoghue’s fiction its force.

Part of that flirtation is the novel’s subtle nod to the world as it is today. It doesn’t take much imagination to see, in a novel about a train full of blissfully trusting passengers hurtling towards catastrophe, parallels with the rapid collapse of democracy in the United States as the country spirals into incompetent autocracy. As Margaret Atwood has said, all novels, whether they take place in the past or the future, are about the present. France in the 1890s, as Eugen Weber recounts in France: Fin de Siècle, was “marked by political scandals, social unrest, dissension, and decadence,” all of which are found on nearly every page of The Paris Express as well as in most present-day online news feeds. As one worker in the novel says, “the bastards keep cutting our wages and blaming it on the price of wheat.” Change “wheat” to “gas” and you’ve pretty much bridged the gap between then and now.

The Paris Express succeeds because Donoghue manages to maintain its internal energy as the train nears its predestination: reading it evokes the same morbid fascination as watching a squirrel crossing a busy highway. Donoghue affirms what we’ve long suspected, that what happens during life is always more interesting than what might happen at the end of it.

Emma Donoghue has published 15 novels, five collections of short stories, four screenplays, and five plays. Of these, The Sealed Letter (2008), The Wonder (2016), The Pull of the Stars (2020), and The Paris Express (2025) were nominated for the Giller Prize. Her novel, Room, won the American Library Association’s Alex Award in 2011, the 2010 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the 2011 Commonwealth Prize for Fiction (Canada & Carribbean), two Libris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers’ Association (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2010. Donoghue wrote the screenplay for the film Room and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of her novel The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh, and adapted Room and The Pull of the Stars for the stage. According to this November 2025 interview, “On Populating Historical Fiction,” Donoghue found inspiration for The Paris Express while preparing for a year in France.

Wayne Grady’s first novel, Emancipation Day, was longlisted for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize and won the Amazon First Novel Award. His novel, Emancipation Day, was nominated for the Giller Prize in 2013. His most recent book, The Cartel and Other Cover Stories, is published this year by Freehand Books. He and his wife, novelist and memoirist Merilyn Simonds, divide their time between Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Further

Header photo: The Paris Express train wreck at Montparnasse in 1895. Photo credited to the firm Levy & fils by this site [Wikimedia]. (It is credited to a photographer “Kuhn” by another publisher [1].) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.