Emma Donoghue is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Her novel Room has sold almost three million copies, and the film adaptation was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture. Her historical fiction novels The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters. It is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.
Interviewed by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): One of the particularly captivating elements of The Paris Express is the variety of characters. There are some twenty or so, and the reader learns intimate details about each while they sit confined, knee to knee in the crowded carriages. One passenger, a one-armed engineer, says “a train line is like an isolated hamlet.” The characters are separated by class yet conjoined by the carriages. Social and political issues emerge within each vignette, including a rushed, clandestine sexual encounter at a station, and the threat of an anarchistic act. All of the issues portrayed mirror our contemporary world. How did you approach the pairing of characters with the issues?
Emma Donoghue (ED): That’s a good question. In a way, even though I ended up with so many characters, they are just a fraction of the ones I sort of mentally ‘auditioned,’ in that I was very free. I took to populate my train and the people who were really honest, I knew a handful of things—like a couple of the politicians—and I knew the crew. But apart from that, I didn’t know who was on the train. And yet I knew that there had to be hundreds of people on the train. So, I cast my net very wide looking for real people who were in northern France around then and could have been on the train. In a way, I allowed the content of the novel to be determined very much by who I chose. And it’s interesting; some people I chose (and they had very interesting backgrounds), but once I put them on my train and had them actually talking to each other, some of them were just not quite as entertaining as I would have hoped. Like some of them on the day, that particular day, weren’t having an interesting enough day. Then I would say to my partner: Oh, I pushed that person off the train! I found some people didn’t have a particularly dramatic story but they were good characters to have on the train. Like the little boy, for instance. He would go on to be a resistance hero, but on that particular day, he’s just a kid, but he was just the right kind of wide-eyed perspective to notice things that others wouldn’t. So, I had to give a lot of them a chance to perform in a few scenes before I was able to judge whether or not they would be good company and the right mix, as well, of course. You know, once I had decided to include Fulgence Bienvenue, the one-armed engineer, I didn’t need any other engineers, for instance.
I wanted a good mix. I wanted people from the worlds of science, sport, and everything to do with speed, for instance. Because this is a novel about transport and because the accident happened because they were in a rush, I thought: I want lots of people on the train who have some kind of commitment to speed in different ways. Either they want to share the convenience of it or they love the thrill of speed and so on. They’re stuck with a couple who sell cars, for instance. I wanted to capture all the excitement of an age of speed, as well as, of course, the downside of fatal accidents.
So, yes, I considered hundreds of people in order to end up with the couple of dozen who I finally did.
NP: Not to be overlooked, the train’s engine is also a character, and she senses “danger somewhere along her flanks,” an evil. Engine 721 “recognizes something kindred” in the anarchist on board, the “iron conviction and unstoppable momentum.” The engine’s voice appears only a few times, but it is remarkable each time. Can you expand on its role as a character, and why you chose the female gender for it.
ED: It was a complete surprise to me to have the train herself talking. This was not part of my plan. I’m a big planner, but, of course, things do arise that surprise me. I found that I had done a huge amount of research about the train system as a whole and how it was so central to the French economy, the French political state, industry—everything depended on this new rapid transport. I had some sort of big picture thoughts, and I found there was no one character who would logically be thinking these things. And then I finally realized: It’s the train. And as for why I made her ‘she,’ I think by tradition large vessels of any kind, like ships or even cars or trains, it’s traditionally been men who work on them and they tend to call them ‘she.’ So that just seemed to make sense.
Originally, I thought I would give the novel a kind of Dickensian narrator, someone who knew everything and could tell the whole story. But I find in any one scene I like to limit the point of view to one person because we all see things so differently. I didn’t have this big overarching narrator. Again, there were certain thoughts, but I thought, maybe it’s the train herself. But I liked the idea that she would have some foreknowledge of what was coming, that she could at least sense what was going on in the mind of the anarchist.
But, yes, that was a surprise element to me. That’s the last thing about planning a novel. You don’t actually have to stick to your plans. It’s not like being an architect. Nothing’s going to fall down if you change your mind.
NP: And the engine is a surprise to the reader, I would say. She has a lovely voice.
The next question picks up something you said earlier. Time plays a critical function in The Paris Express. The novel is structured over the course of a single day in 1895, with a time stamp at the start of each chapter to mark whether the train is on schedule. With each departure and arrival en route, the pace intensifies. And yet, time is manipulated at the outset. The youngest passenger realizes this when he sees that the clocks are set intentionally five minutes apart inside and outside the station. Is it “a trick?” asks young Maurice. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that time is a false construct. Could you tell me your thoughts on how the novel represents time.
ED: Sure. You’re right that it’s an absolutely central concept because, in a way, the accident happens because of the need to stick to the schedule. And, of course, schedules are just made up. There was no like really substantial reason for this crash. It’s not like there was a tsunami or earthquake or some natural disaster. It was just a feeling like how to get there on time, which, of course, is a modern, western obsession. Nobody was worried about this in the centuries leading up to this, but by 1895 they really were. I found it remarkably hyper-modern that the crew of a train in 1895 France would feel under such pressure to make up individual minutes that they would speed and risk disaster. Again, I tried to include perspectives of time from everyone on the train and to choose little epigraphs of time and I found it really pleasing scenes. Partly because the train journey very quickly began, to me, to take on allegorical overtones, like, your life you might think that you have all this time ahead because you’re expecting to get to Paris at four o’clock. Most of us would expect to get to be 80 or 90 but, in fact, your journey could be over at any moment.
The train began to represent not just the length of a human life, but also society’s progress and it sort of just stands for so many things. I found it a really rich theme. A novel like The Paris Express could very easily get loose and baggy if you had hundreds of people on there thinking about anything. So having certain shared obsessions, having things like speed and time come up over and over really helps web it together. And, again, giving the novel very clear limits, saying it will last no longer than the train journey did. That really helps discipline what would otherwise be a very wide-ranging expanse of social survey. Having written novels like Room, I actually love limits. I find they really set you free. Sometimes I’ve written novels with just a couple of characters and this one has lots of characters but is very tight in other ways, like the timekeeping.
NP: Everyone is compartmentalized, so to speak.
ED: Which meant it was quite technically hard to write because if I changed one thing, I’d have to go back and sew up the holes in 10 other chapters. Or if I decided a character should move into a different carriage, I’d be like: Oh my gawd, I have to go back and change all the moments with their scene in the first carriage. I began to feel I was one of the train crew, especially the guard who’s checking people’s tickets. I was like, Oh, I didn’t check her ticket. I had to go back and fix that. And the scenes where they stop at stations and they all get to get out if they want to and buy a sandwich or something. I felt like I was the station guard trying to keep tabs on all these passengers and round them up and get them back on the train in time.
NP: Did you have a floor plan on your wall that had each carriage and the characters in them?
ED: Yes, I had one grimy piece of paper. I mostly used computer sources, but, yes, I did need a visual for this. I had a very grimy diagram of the carriages, and I would make a note of who’s sitting where, when.
NP: It would be hard to keep track otherwise.
My next question picks up again on a couple of things you’ve talked about already. Time and speed—the two are intertwined as the Paris Express hurtles from Granville to Montparnasse station. One passenger, Levassor, speaks eloquently about speed, which he believes “is the only new pleasure invented since the ancients. The thrill of danger, the rush in the veins…” The railways, he says, “democratize that pleasure.” This is such an interesting statement. Could you talk more about the idea of democratized danger in the context of the novel.
ED: You know, it’s funny, I’ve just been to a cottage, and we rented a jet ski and the entire party, from people in their eighties down to people in their lower teens LOVED going on the jet ski. I went on one little ride behind my brother-in-law and I was rigid with terror. So, I don’t personally get the thrill of speed. I like the sheer convenience of being able to fly in a jumbo jet and get somewhere fast in that sense. Or if I’m in a city for a weekend, I like seeing if I can squeeze in three plays. I like to be busy but the actual physical sensation of speed just makes me feel ill.
I love getting to and having characters who are not me. Yes, I put a lot of speed freaks on the train. And, also, there are so many different forms of the pleasure of speed. Things like skiing, people were starting to do. Cycling; that was a very democratized pleasure. Lots of people were cycling. And there was a lot of scandal about women enjoying cycling, too much.
In the 20th Century many bad things happened, obviously, and many wars. But there are a lot of things that became available to the masses for the first time in the 20th Century. Or, going a little earlier, in the 19th Century, you first started to see the working class going on holiday. Actually getting paid time off and because of mass transit they were able to get somewhere fast enough so they could dash off to the seaside for two weeks. These were new pleasures. The poor used to have to very much stay at home. Or, in feudal times, they weren’t even allowed to leave. The idea of being able to dash off somewhere and try something a bit different, that was a new pleasure.
And I didn’t want my novel to be scolding and rebuking the modern world for its speediness. I knew that would be kind of built into the story, the fact that really speed brought on disaster. So, I wanted to capture all the excitement of it, as well.
NP: This last question takes a different track. The engine also represents the advancement of technology—progress—in its day and its role in industrialization and commercialization. Other details in the novel profile early technology concepts, such as moving pictures and subways. This led me to wonder how you see AI, one of the newer, pervasive technologies, influencing and affecting the Arts.
ED: I’m glad you struck that parallel, because, yes, that’s the obvious one. I myself, I think the phrase for it now is ‘AI vegan,’ in that really I see almost no benefit to any use of AI so far. Potentially it could be used for great things. And, actually, when I go to the skin doctor, I’m glad they can use AI to map moles. That’s a legitimate use of it. But any other use of it I’ve seen seems to be cheapening our culture and misusing our environmental resources. My partner’s a professor and in universities they’re all just completely shaken by the fact that students are resorting to Chat GPT to write their essays for them. And, you know, I’m appalled at the idea that we would grant some status of creative artists to machines that are just mimicking or, to be honest, just copying. They’re taking the novels written by people like me and just mimicking them. They’re creating a plausible simulacrum, which is not creativity. I’d be a hardline anti-AI person, but I’m very aware that I might be like the person saying, ‘I don’t like these modern railways. I don’t see the point.’ It’s hard to judge technology until the end, but I would certainly say that all the early uses of AI I’ve seen have been hideous.
NP: Those were all my questions, Emma. Do you have anything you’d like to add?
ED: No, I don’t think so. Those were really substantial questions. I love it! Thank you so much for this.