Writing this got me thinking about my own mortality: Emma Donoghue
By JP O’Malley
At 4pm on October 22, 1895, a train derailed in Montparnasse Station, Paris. After crashing through the platform and wall of the station, the locomotive then fell into the Place de Rennes, killing a woman below. None of the passengers or crew on board the train were killed or seriously injured. Tens of thousands of onlookers flocked to see the wreckage – many presuming the crash must have been an anarchist terror attack, a common occurrence in fin de siècle Europe.
The reason was less dramatic: the driver, Guillaume-Marie Pellerin, had been speeding, and as the train approached the station, he hit the brakes a little too late. The aftermath of the derailment was captured in a stunning photo that has since inspired numerous artists and writers. It features on the cover of John Taylor’s 1982 book An Introduction to Error Analysis and on the cover of American rock band Mr Big’s 1991 album Lean into It.
Emma Donoghue’s new novel takes on the train that famously crashed at Montparnasse station in Paris in 1895.Credit: Woodgate Photography
Practical necessity drew author Emma Donoghue to the famous image. Three years ago her partner, Chris Roulston, landed an academic job in Paris. When the couple were looking for accommodation, Montparnasse seemed an ideal choice. “I was googling Montparnasse, and this photograph leapt up at me,” the 55-year-old Irish-Canadian novelist, screenwriter, playwright and literary historian explains from her home in Ontario, Canada.
The Montparnasse derailment became her temporary obsession. She took the original train journey that led to the crash, which set out from Normandy at 8.45 am. “Looking out the window I started seeing everything through the eyes of October 1895,” Donoghue explains. “I later immersed myself in archives of the Bibliothèque de France, where I drew on more than 40 newspaper articles about the derailment.”
That research inspired Donoghue to write The Paris Express, her 20th book.
The short novel contains 14 chapters: each begins with an epigraph. “The most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the nineteenth century is speed,” reads one quotation Donoghue inserts from W.R. Greg’s essay Life at High Pressure (1877).
The famous photograph (by an unknown photographer) of the Montparnasse derailment.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
A contemporary of Charles Darwin, Greg was an English liberal intellectual who believed that scientific progress and technology could cure society’s problems. “At the beginning of the novel, I’m associating train travel with modernity, high-tech, speed, efficiency and capitalism — which are supposed to get things working faster and better all the time,” Donoghue explains. “But, of course, in capitalism there are many losers and, just like this train journey, things can go horribly wrong.”
Madeleine “Mado” Pelletier also shares that view. She is the first passenger we meet on The Paris Express. In Mado’s metal lunch bucket there is a bomb, which she plans to detonate.
This fictional version of Pelletier is based on a real person: she was a French psychiatrist and radical first-wave leftist feminist, whose work explored the idea that sexual differences are social and cultural constructs. She was sympathetic to anarchist terrorist groups, although there is no evidence that she ever made a bomb, Donoghue points out. “When I’m writing historical fiction, I follow the facts as far as they will take me,” she says. “There are several other real historical figures who could have plausibly been on the train, so I decided to invite them on board too.”
Among the cohort of colourful characters are Fulgence Bienvenue, the architect of the Paris Metro; Marcelle de Heredia, a French neurophysiologist; Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African-American painter; Alice Guy, the world’s first female film director; and John Millington Synge, an Irish playwright.
Donoghue also introduces us to fictional versions of others who were recorded as having been on the train, including the driver, Pellerin, the conductor, Albert Léon Mariett, and long-time deputy in the Assemblée Nationale, Albert Christophle.
A novel that takes place over eight hours imposes certain limitations on its author, Donoghue admits. “The further I got into writing this, I started to feel like the story had the rhythm of a train journey.
“I was also aware that my time was limited and that any element of suspense that was going to touch my reader, I had to fit into that short time span,” she says. “Writing this book also got me thinking about my own mortality and the fact that we all have a personal train journey that can potentially go off the rails at any time because none of us are really sure what is around the corner.”
Donoghue never imagined she would spend most of her adult life in Canada. She was born in Dublin, the youngest of eight children. Literature was in the blood. Her father, Denis, was a literary critic who wrote for The London Review of Books and penned biographies of literary legends such as Henry James, W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Jonathan Swift. Donoghue followed in her father’s footsteps, earning a degree in English and French at University College Dublin.
In the mid-1990s she moved to England, where she completed a PhD on the topic of friendship between men and women in 18th-century English fiction, and at 23 published her first novel, Stir-fry. While completing her studies at Cambridge University, Donoghue met her long-term partner, Chris Roulston; she is a professor of French and Women’s studies at the University of Western Ontario. They have two teenage children, Finn and Una.
Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in the film adaptation of Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room.Credit: NYT
“I now feel fully Canadian, but because I spent the first 20 years of my life in Ireland, my flavour will always be Irish,” says Donoghue. “Last year I returned to Dublin to attend the premiere of my play The Pull of the Stars, an adaptation of my novel. Those kinds of experiences have really helped me keep up my cultural connections with Ireland. I’ve also worked with the Irish film company Element Pictures, who produced Room (2015) and The Wonder (2022).”
Room was based on Donoghue’s best-selling 2010 novel, about five-year-old boy Jack, who is held captive in a single room with his mother and who has never seen the outside world. The book sold nearly three million copies and was subsequently translated into 40 languages. Donoghue was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. She also co-wrote the screenplay for The Wonder, an adaptation of her 2016 novel. “Screenwriting is a wonderful contrast to the quieter, more solitary life of a novelist.” says Donoghue. “I also love the fact that you have to do so much with so few words.”
She recently collaborated with English director Philippa Lowthorpe on H Is for Hawk, a film based on Helen Macdonald’s 2014 award-winning memoir, set to be released later this year.
And in June, at the Blyth Festival, Ontario, she will debut her first musical, The Wind Coming Over the Sea, which uses traditional Irish songs to tell the story of a couple from Ireland who immigrated to Canada during the Great Famine.
Donoghue can identify with the story; she too crossed the Atlantic to be with her beloved. Granted, her own journey was probably a little less stressful than the average 19th-century Irish immigrant experience. “We are a very mobile world,” she says.
“It’s really important to celebrate the immigrant story in today’s world, where there is such a vicious attitude towards immigrants with the rise of [far-right] politics everywhere.”
The Paris Express (Picador) by Emma Donoghue is published on March 25.
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