They’re touting Paula Hawkins’ debut thriller, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, as this year’s Gone Girl.
It’s pretty darn good.
The girl on the train is Rachel, who does the daily commute from Ashbury to Euston. She has a very fertile imagination but her womb is a barren place where her ex-husband’s seed could not find purchase.
Rachel’s failure to fall pregnant made her tiresome and so her ex-husband, Tom embarked on an affair with Anna, who proved more fecund, and replaced Rachel in the marital home. Which just so happens to back on to the Ashbury to London railway line.
Tom and Anna, however, are not the focus of Rachel’s voyeuristic fantasies. That mantle goes to a couple she has named Jason and Jess, who live at number 15.
Rachel has imagined a whole life around this couple, quite a bit of it quite perceptive, but the fertile imagination goes frighteningly febrile when something she witnesses does not go according to script and “Jess”, real name Megan, disappears. And the real life “Jason”, Megan’s husband, Scott, falls under suspicion.
Paula Hawkins has created a clever crossword/jigsaw puzzle of a novel, playing cat and mouse with a narrative where cat and mouse could well be interchangeable.
Not only is Rachel deemed an unreliable witness by the police, but her own history of alcoholic binge and memory loss puts her at odds not only with what she thinks she saw but at what she cannot remember.
Rachel it seems has not only fixated on “Jason and Jess” but regularly leaves unwanted and unwarranted telephone messages on her ex-husband’s telephone and has frequented the street where he and new spouse, Anna, live.
Hawkins has coupled the carriages of the three women’s narrative behind an express engine of intrigue, mystery, and monstrous manipulation.
Central to the narrative of all three women is reproduction. Rachel’s barrenness has borne her to the baroness of booze. Anna’s progeny has fulfilled a fairy tale ideal at the expense of the exiled ex, Rachel. And Megan’s motherhood experience becomes a major plot point as her history hurtles through the pages intersecting and colliding with the multi-tiered tale of treachery and tragedy.
A thoroughbred thriller whose lineage could well come from Strangers on a Train out of Rear Window, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN is a first class ticket to ride in the page turning edge of your seat stakes and best kept for a long commute.
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins is published by Doubleday.