Novels No. 92

 

Emma Donoghue. The Paris Express. Canada: Harper Perennial, 2025.

What an amazing project! Researching, recreating an 1895 day’s train ride from a Normandy resort town to Paris, with dozens of passengers aboard. Each crew member or agent is brought alive in the bustling, demanding business of transporting people from place to place, thanks to a glorious steam engine. No detail of that engine’s operation is too small for the imagination to overlook, from sweaty coal shovelling to signals recognition and the intricacies of controlled steam release. Likewise we visit the proud but nerve-wracking jobs performed by driver Guillaume, stoker Victor, and senior guard Léon. And so, too, Donoghue conjures the contemporary milieu of politics and general unrest. France has been lately plagued with anarchist and Communard protests over social inequalities and injustices.

We meet passengers as they crowd into First, Second, or Third Class carriages. Some stand out more than others, especially the young woman who plans to blow up the train. Mado thinks her homemade bomb will make the best protest yet, even though she herself and many innocents must die in the blast; several government legislators in nearby First Class are her real target. But perspicacious old Blonska sees Mado desperately clutching her suspicious lunch bucket—can anything at all stop her death plan? As the train speeds to Paris ‒ where the explosion will do the most damage ‒ who has our sympathies? Pregnant Cécile deep in labour; young Maurice panicking at missing his stop; Marcelle and Henry forming a new friendship; a mother caring for her dying daughter; the coffee seller burdened with heavy equipment; carefree students joking; Jules-Félix resting uneasily in his luxurious private car.

The tension is unbearable as the train enters Paris suburbs. No spoilers—but what follows is nothing short of sensational. With her characters talking up the main concerns of the day, and newfangled inventions, Donoghue has placed us right in their laps for a thrilling ride.

Peeks

▪ Bad enough to have been born female, but she refuses to dress the part. Stone-faced, Mado checks the set of her cravat, then her hat. (3-4)

▪ Railwaymen are figures of legend to Maurice, and engines are the dragons they command. (4)

▪ The Express has a crew of four, including the guards, but only the driver and the stoker count as rollers—royals among railwaymen. (13)

▪ Blonska might move with the frail, bobbing glide of a seahorse, but she’s a tough old boot. (18)

▪ Moving at a trot, Léon doubles back to Front Baggage, his base for the journey, and climbs in just in time to hear Le Goff’s final warning whistle. He mounts the short ladder to perch in the senior guard’s birdcage, a lantern-shaped lookout on the roof. (22)

▪ Jeanne may be suffering from something serious, a mysterious disorder revealed by a special test. What a thing to suggest to a stranger on a train! (96)

▪ “But we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that tearing down this society will make a better one.” (145)

▪ Now the girl’s guessed that Blonska knows, which makes the situation even more dangerous. (187)

Giles Blunt. Bad Juliet. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2025.

How strange is this: two novels in a row that involve historical travel. It’s years since I’ve read anything by Blunt—loved his John Cardinal series, so this story was quite a change.

In 1916 Paul Gascoyne is an aspiring poet with a master’s degree, and due to an uncharacteristic breach of manners, he was turfed from a plum university teaching job. Luckily, a friend helped and he’s quietly working as an English literature tutor for patients at renowned Saranac Lake tuberculosis treatment complex. He lives among recovering patients in a “cure cottage” run by the sardonic Mrs Pryce. One of them is the wistful, attractive Sarah Ballard—Paul learns her history as a Lusitania disaster survivor, having lost both her father Lionel Redmond and her brand new husband, Stephen Ballard. Encouraging Sarah to write memoir stories is an uphill struggle; verbally, she’s appealingly articulate, but initially balking at writing. Paul is thrilled at a chance meeting with playwright Jasper Keene. Jasper (himself recovered from TB) is a grandiose, volatile personality and their common literary interests provide a bond.

Jasper is ebullient about his courtship of Sarah, who responds in kind, and Paul seeks solace in Saranac’s abundant population of nurses. Then drama: Stephen Ballard’s father accuses Sarah of lying about her marriage to his son. Sarah admits her deception. Only Paul, whom she trusts, hears the real story. In fact the novel’s only real drive is in Sarah’s stories, as they are told to Paul. Without coming to terms with his feelings about her, Paul is becoming a tediously passive creature failing to find his poetry mojo. Nevertheless the trio enjoys a warm friendship. Until Sarah over-exerts at Jasper’s bidding and suffers near-fatal hemorrhaging. Will anyone now display some pro-activity?

The Lake Saranac complex is/was real, including the sanitarium that closed 1 Dec 1954—the date Paul allegedly publishes this novel. The book’s mystery element lies within Sarah’s character, or how it is perceived by others; I felt at least one clever insertion by the author went unresolved. But Blunt gives us an environment rich in resort town culture and clinical treatment details of the era, all coloured in lingering Victorian sensibilities.

Paul

▪ I focused the less-than-chivalrous part of my mind on how to disarm Nurse Troy so that she might consent to free me — and I assumed herself — from the tiresome burden of virginity. (65-6)

▪ In the weeks and months to come, I would sometimes wonder if, had I been man enough to put my arms around her, had I held her close and assured her that she would not have to face her predicament alone, things — her future and mine — might have turned out differently. (130)

▪ “You won’t lose me, Sarah. Honestly, there’s nothing you could tell me that would change my feelings for you.” (220)

▪ I had told Sarah that memoirs need not be strictly factual, and clearly she had decided to turn hers into pure fiction — and melodrama at that. (236)

Sarah 

▪ “The Lusitania is the last thing — the last thing in this sad, sorry world I want to write about.” (54)

▪ For now she could take short walks, but any physical exertion greater than this could cause the scar tissue to tear, provoking a hemorrhage that — if it didn’t kill her — could add months, or even years, to her recovery. (71)

▪ “I just — yes. I mean, you did tell me it was a memoir, not autobiography, not history. It was okay to make things up.” (119)

▪ “But if you love me, you’re just going to be unhappy. I’m with Jasper, and that isn’t ever going to change.” (217)

Bits

▪ “Patients do not discuss their illness at the table.” (34)

▪ “The poor girl is already in the sights of Mr. Jasper Keene, and I don’t know which of you is the more dangerous. Hearts get broken, Mr. Gascoyne, and I do not want to see it.” (102)

▪ “She makes beautiful sketches — portraits, landscapes — in pencil, in ink, pastel. I think she’d make an excellent instructor.” (147)

▪ “Is that why you wormed your way into my confidence? To close in on the woman I loved?” (174)

▪ “I’m hearing from several fronts that you should be summarily dismissed from your position, if not horse-whipped out of town.” (212)