After Room, Emma Donoghue’s latest novel shows that she is a true original

From the first page of ‘The Paris Express’ we are taken into a world of glamour, danger and chaos. It is proof of Donoghue’s extraordinary talent, writes Robert McCrum, and why she was never going to become snared by the trappings of literary fame

Fascinated by the mysteries and rituals of storytelling, Emma Donoghue has immersed herself in her subject: the romance of steam (Woodgate Photography 2024)

Emma Donoghue has been a literary star since 2011 when, with the publication of Room, her addictive bestseller, she became an overnight sensation. A work of contemporary Gothic about a five-year-old child’s incarceration with his “Ma” in a locked room, this was a brilliant, imaginative reconstruction, based on the newspaper story of Felix, the real-life Austrian boy in the notorious Josef Fritzl case.

Donoghue is a much more interesting and subtle writer than this raw summary might suggest. Not only does she have an impressive backlist of work in many genres, she did not crash and burn as lesser artists, consumed by celebrity, might have done.

In an age of fiction conditioned by the ruthless monetising of narrative models, and driven by commercial creative writing programmes, she is a true original who’s held true to herself as a novelist steeped in the literature of her native Ireland, and fascinated by the mysteries and rituals of storytelling.

Her dedication to this craft probably holds the key to some longstanding resilience to the snares of literary fame. Her accomplishments are manifest from the first page of The Paris Express. Her readers will find themselves on an exciting trip, but in safe hands. When we board in Granville on the coast of Normandy, in the autumn of 1895, we know that locomotive 721 will transport us to all the glamour, danger and chaos of fin-de-siecle Paris, the City of Light that casts its fitful rays across the shabby metropolis at the rotten heart of the Third Republic.

Donoghue’s subject is a modern one: The Paris Express is all about speed, and its heady corollary, escape. Good writing is also about momentum, and another corollary, the suspension of disbelief. This novel is a masterclass in both: an engrossing narrative, married to its intrinsic specificity, the joy of details.

As in Room, Donoghue has immersed herself in her subject: the romance of steam, from the blue upholstery of the Granville carriages, to the stench of “the conductor’s urine”. But she lavishes her special attention on Engine 721 to the point where, on page 65, it becomes a character in the drama of this journey, capable of “reading her passengers’ minds”. This fanciful contrivance is derived from the very good reason that 721’s headlong acceleration is propelling it to a rendezvous with death and destruction.

The Paris Express has the air of a well-researched period piece (with walk-on roles for a doomed Irishman, the playwright John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World, together with the American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, renowned for his Resurrection of Lazarus).

It does, however, also conceal a doubly explosive core: a young anarchist, Mado, with her homemade bomb, and Ms Donoghue herself, an omniscient narrator who’s fearless in the unveiling of her storytelling revelations.

One of the many fascinations of this novel – with shades of Room – lies in the way Donoghue compels the reader’s attention through her exquisite command of time and space, character and location. The scene in which the Russian emigre Elise Blonska delivers Cecile Langlois’ premature baby is not just brilliant reportage, it’s a well-timed metaphor for the subtle interplay of history and everyday life we find permeating The Paris Express. More than that, the accumulation and delivery of loving detail in a setting with which the reader is now completely at home is perfectly judged.

‘The Paris Express’ is the latest novel from Emma Donoghue (Picador)

It was at this point in my reading of The Paris Express that I found myself wanting a favourite soundtrack from classical music, Arthur Honegger’s hypnotic masterpiece, “Pacific 321”. This haunting orchestral portrait of a great American steam locomotive, from its first premonitory hoot as it leaves the station to its cathartic climax at top speed and ultimate return to rest, is a work of art that’s possibly equivalent to Donoghue’s enthralling fiction.

On top of her well-judged set-pieces, she achieves her grip on her audience by populating her steam train with an engaging mix of real and invented fellow passengers. Alongside the anonymous railway crew, there are at least a dozen “real people” whose names we know from the newspaper reports inspired by the sensational arrival of the Paris express at the Gare Montparnasse on 22 October 1895.

“The Montparnasse Derailment” was a minor train crash in an age known for spectacular railway disasters. No one died. Engine 721 pitched forward through a station wall, and its vertiginous resting point became a nine-day wonder to contemporary media. Mado’s anarchist-terrorist atrocity, as told in Donoghue’s novel, never happened. Perhaps, as in her book, a new baby was born. And so the world turns. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue is published on 20 March (Picador, £18.99)