The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

            The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.

"But I know something happened on Saturday. I knew it when I looked into that dark tunnel under the railway line, my blood turning to ice water in my veins."

This is Paula Hawkins' first thriller which may be hard to believe once you immerse yourself into this incredible psychological thriller. It is an accomplished piece of fiction, gripping, assured and confident with inescapable tension. Highly recommended.
Zimbabwe-born author Paula Hawkins took six months to write this thriller. She had to borrow money from her father during this period.

Inevitably, comparisons have been made with Gone Girl with the use of unreliable narrators and a disappearing wife. Hawkins' novel is less psychotic and the author seems to pay homage to Hitchcock especially Strangers on a Train and Rear Window.

Rachel Watson is the girl on the train. She is described in negative terms throughout: pathetic, sad, ugly, an alcoholic and rubbernecker. Her marriage to Tom has broken down and she feels dejected so she takes solace in drink to drown her sorrows and her obsession with her ex fills her lonely, miserable hours. She has lost her job but continues to travel on the 8.04 from Ashbury to London so that Cathy, her landlady doesn't suspect that Rachel is unemployed and short of cash. It keeps up the pretence of normality.

"Twice a day I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment." This allows her to fantasize. It's July 2013. The train usually juddered to a halt outside a row of Victorian houses where Rachel used to live. In carriage D she feels at home as she stares into number 15, her favourite. She makes up names for the besotted couple; Jason and Jess, the perfect, golden couple. It's easy to think that someone else's life is perfect when you don't know them. As we know, the truth can be very different. "They're a match, they're a set. They're happy I can tell. They're what I used to be, they're Tom and me five years ago. They're what I lost, they're everything I want to be."

Most days, especially during the summer, she sees Jess outside having coffee. Rachel's own life is depressing and it's sad when she tells us she would rather be here, in the train "looking out at the houses beside the track, then almost anywhere else." Her face is puffy from drinking and lack of sleep, she is no longer considered desirable so she spends endless nights drinking her gin and tonics or bottles of wine and passing out. For five years she was blissfully happy and utterly wretched. She was hopelessly in love with Tom and having IVF treatment which failed: "I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost." Tom found himself a sexy mistress who he fell in love with and before long, he discarded his wife, divorced her and married Anna.

Rachel's life was so empty that Jason and Jess became important to Rachel. The diary format of the three female narrators, Rachel, Megan and Anna enables the reader to hear extremely personal thoughts and feelings, sometimes obsessive and paranoid. They are all imperfect women with differing amounts of guilt and self-centredness, but very real and well drawn, in fact beautifully drawn.

Megan Hipwell is a daydreamer seeking fun. Living close to the railway track she imagines the commuters going to work are travelling to exotic locations, fulfilling adventures of a lifetime. Since the gallery closed, her days seem empty. She would like to see herself as a happily married suburbanite. She lived close to Tom and Anna Watson and volunteered to look after their daughter but she disliked it so soon quit. She suffers frequent bouts of insomnia and feels that she's playing at real life rather than living it. Like Rachel, another sad case. She is not satisfied with just being a wife, waiting patiently for her husband to come home and love her so she looks for a distraction. An affair perhaps?

Her brother Ben died when she was 15 and she has never got over this childhood trauma: "he's the big hole in my life, in the middle of my soul." They were going to be roadtrippers but that didn't happen: "He died on the A10, his skull crushed beneath the wheels of an articulated lorry." Megan ran away from home at this point and was arrested for theft and soliciting. She admits that she's all over the place "slipping and sliding again." She agrees to see a therapist, a Dr Kamal Abdic who listens patiently to her tales of panic attacks, insomnia and eventually, other shocking revelations that have haunted her. She feels trapped. Her husband Scott is suspicious and checks her emails. Megan talks about her real self, a self nobody, not even Scott knows about and a mystery lover-her distraction from the boredom she suffers.

"What if the thing I'm looking for can never be found? What if it just isn't possible?" Stifled, restless but hungry for adventure and fun. "Why can't I just get what I want? Why can't they give it to me?"

On one eventful day for Rachel she sees Jess as usual outside her home, not with her husband, but with an Asian man who kissed her long and deep. It shattered her illusion of the perfect, golden couple. She was disappointed with her heroine and it reminds her of her ex-husband's infidelity. This in turn turns to anger.

Anna Watson was physically similar to Megan, blonde and attractive, full of love for Tom and her baby daughter. She gloated over her conquest, the smug satisfaction of triumph over Rachel but is constantly harassed by Rachel's phone calls and visits so her peace of mind is shattered and she loathes stepping into Rachel's shoes and living at number 23. Boredom sets in and she longs for the girlie nights out drinking at the pub. She is constantly tired, bedraggled and prone to emotional outbursts. On reflection, being the mistress was more self-satisfying than being the wife and mother.

Drama unfolds with Megan's disappearance totally out of the blue. Rachel was drunk at the time and she knew that something bad had happened. She found herself in the underpass near the station, close to Megan's house. The inside of her mouth hurt and she had a metallic tang of blood on her tongue, a feeling of nausea and dizziness. Her hair was matted with blood and she had a lump on her head, her legs were bruised and her lower lip, cut. She vomited before passing out. " I feel certain that I was in an argument, or that I witnessed an argument." Rachel is convinced that she was involved in Megan's disappearance even though she had never met her, only seen her from the train. She wonders whether the blood on her hands is in fact, Megan's? Did she kill her? What has happened to Megan? It is wonderful to experience the blurring between the memory and imagination. Will Rachel ever remember what happened that fateful night and solve the mystery?

As soon as the book was published it was optioned for film by Universal films/Dreamworks. The film has already been made and is due to be released on 7th October 2016 starring Emily Brunt as Rachel. The trailer is available to watch online and looks superb. Paula Hawkins was more than happy to allow Eric Cressida Wilson to act as screenwriter. Something to look forward to this autumn!

Interview with Emily Blunt: The Daily Mail by Gabrielle Donnelly. September 2016.
"I was really tired all the time, which is not my normal self, and people (her co-stars) thought I'd begun drinking heavily, just to get into character."

" I don't think I've ever played someone who is in such a dark place and truly in the depths of despair."
Emily Blunt had just discovered that she was pregnant with her second child. She is married to U.S. actor John Krasinski.
"It cost me an enormous amount both physically and emotionally to play someone like that-an addict on the brink of a nervous breakdown."

Emily Blunt.

The book is originally set in the Home Counties but relocated to New York for the movie.
In 2006 she starred in The Devil Wears Prada and recently, Into The Woods. She is due to start filming a remake of Mary Poppins.

Daisy Goodwin talks to The Daily Mail November 2016 about emotional abuse. Rachel has been (and still is) emotionally abused within the home making it "difficult to hold on to your sense of self. She tortures herself by taking a train that passes the house where her ex-husband lives with his new wife and baby." Goodwin believes Rachel's marriage ended because of her infertility and alcoholism although it seems that being emotionally abused has also contributed greatly to the breakdown of her marriage. Goodwin continues to state that Rachel "is so sunk in alcoholic self-loathing" that it takes the entirety of the novel (and film) before the realisation dawns on her that her ex-husband's version of what happened is far from the truth.
"He has been exploiting her drunken blackouts to convince her that her behaviour is much worse than it is."

Matthew Bond from The Daily Mail gave the film 3 stars. "It's refreshing to find a film with three female leads, but you can't help but notice that all three are victims of one sort or another, and that all three have flaws that render them, to varying degrees, unlikeable. In other words, it's a contrived and complex film with nobody to root for." 2016. He draws comparisons with Hitchcock such as Rear Window and Vertigo but believes the film most resembles Gone Girl. He concludes by saying that the film is good rather than great.

Breaking News:
Deadgoodbooks.com has just announced that Paula Hawkins' new book "Into The Water" will be published on 2 May 2017 by Transworld.

Publisher: Doubleday/Transworld    ISBN: 978-0-857-5223-1-3

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

COPYRIGHT 2016. Permission must be obtained from the author before this article review is reproduced.