On October 22 1895, the number 56 train left Granville at 8.45am and reached Paris’ Gare Montparnasse just before 4pm. But the brakes weren’t working properly. Trying to make up for lost time, the crew couldn’t stop the train. It overshot the buffers, smashed through the station wall, and plunged nose-first into the street below. Crowds rushed to see the wreck. The story made headlines around the world as engineers struggled for days to remove the 50-tonne locomotive. The crash became one of the most famous in history, immortalised by dramatic photographs and widespread fascination.
Emma Donoghue (Room, 2010; Frog Music, 2014; and The Pull of the Stars, 2020) reimagines the derailment in her latest novel, The Paris Express, set on board the Granville-to-Paris train, and unfolding in real time over the course of seven hours.
Central to the story is Mado Pelletier, “stocky, plain, and 21, in her collar, tie and boxy skirt”, a style known as á l’androgyne. The French anarchist sees the train as “a moving image of the unfairness of the living conditions of life”, a literal engine of capitalism and class separation, in everything from clothing to food to access to space and privacy. In her metal lunch pail is a homemade explosive. Mado boards with full intent to detonate the bomb before the train reaches Paris, her mission even more urgent when she learns that three government deputies are among the passengers.
But the long journey gives her pause. Mado travels third class, seated shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow working-class passengers. She forms unintentional connections with a boy travelling alone, with an unwed pregnant woman, with ordinary people, a situation that slowly chips away at Mado’s resolve. “The one flaw in her plan,” she realises, “is that riding for hours in third class means getting familiar with these people before she has to kill them.” There’s no time left for sentimentality, she reminds herself, but it’s no longer clear whether she believes it.
Donoghue populates the train with a wonderfully diverse group of characters. Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African-American artist in first class, has left the US in search of artistic freedom in France. He shares a brief but meaningful exchange with Marcelle de Heredia Lapicque, a Cuban French medical student. Triggered by a nosebleed, their conversation touches on race, ambition, and the chance for human connection in this unlikely setting.
Elsewhere on the train, a secretary working for film pioneer Léon Gaumont dreams of using his new camera to create “moving pictures”. A cabaret performer travels with a student and a monkey, and two political deputies slip away to talk strategy. Then there’s Blonska, a Russian émigré who lives frugally so she can give away what she saves. It’s Blonska who begins to suspect that Mado is hiding something, not through fear but by calmly reading the room. She becomes a kind of moral anchor in the story: thoughtful, observant and unafraid to speak when it counts.
One of Donoghue’s more unexpected choices is giving the train a presence. Engine 721 is described in the language of early industrial poetry and lent a distinct personality that is powerful, indifferent, unstoppable. “She never meant them any harm; this is simply how she was made,” Donoghue writes. In another passage, “She recognises something kindred in Mado Pelletier’s iron conviction.” It’s a literary device that gives the journey an eerie, unsettling atmosphere.
Donoghue’s fascination with the train’s crew adds further depth. In an interview she explained, “The railway companies made sure the driver and the stoker always worked together, lived together, even. They had to communicate over the deafening noise of the engine without words, just by gestures. They read each other’s movements, the machine, the landscape. It was like a kind of dance.” That physical, choreographed connection between the crew and the engine gives the story a steady emotional rhythm built on tension, trust and co-ordination.
The novel is packed with period details that ground it in 1895 Paris, a hub of modernity, progress, speed and consumerism — from the practice of “inside time”, where station clocks ran five minutes slower to prevent passengers from missing their train to the brutal reality of railway worker fatalities. Passengers in third class sit on bare wooden benches. Toilets are non-existent. At every stop, “a score of passengers hops off with the constrained gait of people in urgent search of a latrine”.
From early on, we know something will go wrong, the disaster signalled through a slow build of questionable decisions and delays. One politician demands a private carriage be attached, which sets the train back by eight minutes. Guillaume, the driver, considers pushing the train faster to make up time. Small actions compound until it’s too late.
Donoghue’s writing is meticulously researched, cinematic in detail and rich with moral complexity. The Paris Express is a story about people caught in motion, physically and emotionally, at a time of tremendous political unrest and technological change. But it’s also about choices: the ones made in moments of fear and the ones that feel small but turn out to matter most. Progress never arrives without consequence, Donoghue reminds us, in what may be one of the finest novels you’ll read this year.
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