The Girl on the Train is such a gripping novel, Paula Hawkins' remarkable understanding of the limits of human knowledge, and the degree to which memory and imagination can become confused . I didn’t have any preconceived notions before I started but sure I didn’t think I would be sucked into the story as I was. I am still amazed at the author’s talent at writing such an outstanding debut.
The protagonist Rachel reflects on her fellow passengers on her daily ride to and from London .She thinks, "I recognize them and they probably recognize me. I don't know whether they see me, though, for what I really am." They don't, of course, and they can't. It's hard enough — maybe impossible — for a person even to see herself for what she really is.
The story is split among three women, each of them unreliable to varying degrees, and each of them carrying around a lot of baggage. The focus is Rachel, a miserable alcoholic who commutes into London every day, creating a fantasy world for a glamorous couple she sees sitting out on their deck each morning. The couple live along the road from Rachel’s ex-husband Tom and his new wife Anna, who slips into the narrative modestly at first before muscling in more firmly as the story progresses.
Hawkins shows real skill in switching between the characters’ voices at just the right time to ramp up the tension. The subtle exposures about each of the characters and how they relate to the current situation are drip-fed to the reader with precision, and the author is good at making trivial details suddenly have huge importance.
"They are a perfect, golden couple," Rachel Watson thinks, regarding handsome Jason and his striking wife, Jess. "He is dark-haired and well built, strong, protective, kind. He has a great laugh. She is one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty, pale-skinned with blond hair cropped short." Rachel, the main narrator is obsessed with the pair; they represent to her the perfect relationship that she once had, or seemed to, before it imploded spectacularly. There are unremitting thoughts about Jason and Jess, but she doesn't know them. She sees them through the windows of a train, one she takes each morning and evening on her commute .The couple, whose real names are Megan and Scott, live a few houses away from the one Rachel used to occupy, before her alcoholism poisoned her relationship. "They're a match, they're a set," Rachel reflects. "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."
When Megan(who Rachel imagines as Jess) is missing, Rachel's world, , shifts even farther off-center. Did Megan run away, or was she kidnapped? What about the man that Rachel saw kissing Megan one morning? Rachel finds herself unable to stay away, and winds up directly in the middle of the investigation, all while trying to deal with her growing addiction to alcohol and her frequent memory lapses.
This is Hawkins' first thriller — she's a journalist by training — but it doesn't read like the work of someone new to suspense. The novel is perfectly paced, from its arresting beginning to its twist ending; it's not an easy book to put down.at the same time the first half of the book is very slow,though what keeps the reader clinged on to it is its gritiness. There was a quote describing Cathy which is really nice and one of the most catchy lines of the book “Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring. But it's not so bad, I can think of worse traits in a flatmate”
The protagonist Rachel is on a journey along the backs of houses on the street where she used to live. Unable to look at number 23, her old home, where ex-husband Tom now lives with new wife Anna, she focuses instead on number 15. Rachel looks out for the pair every day, daydreaming about their perfect lives. Until one day she sees something that startles her in their garden, and when she reads in the paper that “Jess” – who is really called Megan – has vanished, she decides to tip off the police. She is convinced that “Jason”, now the prime suspect – and really called Scott – would never harm his beloved wife.
But Rachel is prone to blackouts, irrationality and drunk dialling, and the police dismiss her as a rubbernecker. She has also been persecuting Tom and Anna, bombarding them with offensive messages. It is a bold move to create such a flawed female lead; the alcoholic lifestyle with its miserable excuses, urine-soaked underwear and vomit on the stairs is outlined in all its bleak, repeated obviousness. Nevertheless it has an unreliable narrative pattern ,the story roars at a pace of a high speed train in which Hawkins delivers a 360 degree view of lust , love, marriage and divorce making it a power-packed psychological thriller.
Hawkins juggles perspectives and timescales with great skill, and considerable suspense builds up along with empathy for an unusual central character who does not immediately grab the reader .Hawkins’s Girl is a less flashy, but altogether more solid creation.
A few blemishes in the book are that there is something a little less convincing about the climax. An over-reliance on a returning memory of one of Rachel’s blackouts begins to grate, likewise when Rachel starts to visit Megan’s therapist undercover to get information, it’s a bit clumsy. But overall this is a cleverly crafted piece of modern suburban noir. And moreover , its more a work of fiction than a work of literature .there is cynicism, fatalism and moral ambiguity.
Hawkins' writing is excellent, and also cinematic, in the best possible way. Her novel doesn't read (as many thrillers do) like a screenplay that's been wrestled kicking and screaming into prose form. But the story, down to the title, is indisputably Hitchcockian, and in some scenes, The ending plays out like a movie scene — perhaps a little too much like one, though it's easy to forgive a little melodrama when the prose that's led up to it is so solid.
Out of 10 i would rate the novel a 7.5 for an exhilarating live through.
The girl on the train is one such un-put-down-able suspense thriller which is well structured and gives the reader the fulfilment of having completed a remarkable anecdote in the end. Also keeping in mind that it is the author’s debut it’s an outstanding work
- JAYASHREE RAJAN
