Fact and Fiction: A Q&A with Emma Donoghue

All aboard Emma Donoghue’s latest, a taut story centered on a real-life tragedy. Delving deep into the psyche of an anarchist and holding a mirror to society’s structures of class and race, this is a captivating story. Emma joined B&N blog writer Isabelle McConville to chat all about historical fiction, characterization and more in The Paris Express.

Hardcover $23.99 $26.99

The Paris Express: A Novel

The Paris Express: A Novel

By Emma Donoghue

In Stock Online

Hardcover $23.99 $26.99

Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring” (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring” (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

IM: Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Emma Donoghue, author of Room, The Pull of the Stars, Learned by Heart, and most recently, The Paris Express. Emma, thank you so much for being here today.

ED: My pleasure, Isabelle. Thanks for having me.

IM: Can you please set up the story of your new novel for us?

ED: The Paris Express is about a real train disaster, and it’s set over a single day when an express train sets out from the town of Granville on the Normandy coast and heads straight to Paris. And there were only meant to be four stops. It was meant to get there at four o’clock and it all went horribly wrong. My story, like much of my historical fiction, is as factual as I could possibly make it. For instance, we have the real train crew, and I described some real passengers. I’ve also invited onto the train many real people who, I don’t know if they were on the train that day, but they could have been. It’s a combination of fact and fiction in a way that I just love to do.

IM: I’m so glad that you did that because this book was really great and I loved reading the author’s note afterward, where you explained where each character came from and how you pulled together your story from these real people. Can you pinpoint the moment you knew you wanted to write this book?

“I knew in a single moment that I had to dig in and write a novel about it.”

ED: Yes, it was absolutely instant. We were going to France for a year because my partner’s a professor of French, so whenever she gets a sabbatical from her university here in Canada, we head to France. We were going to Montparnasse in Paris — that’s the place we happened to find a three-bedroom apartment. I thought to Google the area, and I saw this photograph from October 1895. It’s this extraordinary image — which I probably shouldn’t describe as it’s a bit of a spoiler — but it suggested a train journey that ended up the way nobody on board thought it would. It was such an image of modernity and high tech and progress, and yet, absurd disaster. I knew in a single moment that I had to dig in and write a novel about it.

IM: I’d love to talk a bit about the quote that you opened the book up with: “It’s the occasional disaster. What does it matter? Let’s take necessary evils in our stride. Every great invention cost a few lives.” Can you walk me through what you wanted that line to do for readers, how you found it and how you knew you wanted it to open the book?

ED: It’s from an obscure poem written for a poetry competition about trains that many people entered in 1846. I use one of the other poems as an epigraph in one chapter, and this particular poem is a satirical cut-down of this new industry. I did the translation of that quote, and I wanted it to sound like politicians giving statements today about climate change and so on. You know, like, “On we go, on we go. There may be a few little hitches, but we oligarchs are still happy.” That was the kind of timeless right-wing mentality that I was trying to capture in that satirical poem.

IM: I do think you did exactly that. Did you know that you wanted to start the book with that poem from the start?

ED: No, all I knew was the rules of the game as it were. I knew that I wanted the journey and the book to be absolutely coexistent so that it would start as people got on the train and finish about a minute after it arrived. I knew that I wanted lots of people and lots of ideas. It’s a very fully populated train and I knew that I wanted them to be very diverse, not just in the usual posh people down to poor people, but diverse in all the ways that Paris was diverse in the 1890s, because diversity makes fiction more interesting as well as more true. It’s literally more flavorful if you take a revisionist look at the past and you say, ‘how is it not like all those traditional TV dramas? Who was there that you didn’t realize would be there?’ I also knew I wanted the novel to be quite lean and fast, even though it has so much in the way of social commentary and ideas in it. I knew I wanted it to move fast because an express train moves fast.

IM: I love how we jump from different character perspectives very quickly. A lot of the time, we would jump after only a few paragraphs into the next passenger’s brain and read what they’re experiencing. What was it like to write from all of those different perspectives at once and keep the story moving forward?

“The reader, as well as the writer, has to work a bit harder when there are lots of point of view characters.”

E: It’s a technical challenge, but the reader, as well as the writer, has to work a bit harder when there are lots of point of view characters. I think it was crucial for me to make it an ensemble piece because this is a novel about an entire society shown in the microcosmic form of a train. It was really important to have that full variety, from a kid on his own on the train for the first time right through to world-weary politicians and millionaires. It was absolutely crucial to show that variety and to show how different people would see different things. Sometimes I show the characters through the eyes of each other. There’s a particular young woman, Mado Pelletier, and lots of people spot her and think she’s ugly or she’s dressed very manly, and think, ‘who’s that obnoxious looking girl?’ You see her from the outsider’s point of view, and then we have lots of passages from her point of view. That’s a sort of empathy exercise in itself, when readers are led to the process of seeing and judging people from one side and another. The train herself is one of the point of view characters. I’ve never done that, but in this case, there seemed to be a lot of ideas that only the train would have, and that only she would see the big picture, in terms of France and Europe and the world being covered with this network of high-speed transit for the first time. She’d see everything exciting about it, but everything ruthless and harmful about it as well.

IM: What was it like to write from the train’s perspective? Did you go in knowing you wanted to take on that perspective or did you figure it out along the way?

ED: No, as with many decisions in a book, it began as something else. I grew up on novels like Dickens and the Brontës, and the kind of 19th century novels with an omniscient narrator, often a very wise narrator, like in George Elliot novels. I’ve always wanted to do one, and I’ve never quite managed it. I think because anytime I try it, Isabelle, I find myself thinking — unlike a Victorian writer — I can’t possibly see it from everyone’s point of view simultaneously. I’m biased, of course. I think I fundamentally don’t believe in this kind of God-like, bird’s-eye neutral view of everything. Even for this novel, when I tried it, I found myself thinking, ‘No, it’s not an all-seeing eye. What is it? What is it?’ I finally decided it was the train; the train would get glimpses into the minds of those traveling through her. I tried to think of it as an earthworm tasting the earth as she chews on it. But of course, her loyalty is to the journey. She’s the residue of an omniscient narrator.

IM: That’s really interesting, because I was curious about if you ever thought to write this from a different perspective, like first person, or if you thought to alter character perspectives as you jumped between them. Did that ever cross your mind, or did you always know you wanted it to be third?

“Often, young writers think the only authentic way to write is first-person present tense, but that’s just not true. There are a lot of different techniques.”

ED: Yeah, I find that close third person is the default technique. Anytime in my career I’ve used first person, it’s usually because I want to be in that character’s head for the entire book. I want it to feel as if there’s no gap at all between the readers and that person, like Jack in Room, where I was just completely opening his naïve, innocent mind to the reader in that way. Whereas third person is terribly good if you want to see things from that character’s perspective on the page, but you can also easily increase the distance. It’s as if you’re a bird on their shoulder and you can flutter up a few feet and look down and be rather critical of the person. I did this when I was writing from the point of view of Christophle, the very rich member of Parliament who delays the train that day. This is actually true, by the way. What delayed the train was basically one rich guy asking them to make an unscheduled stop so he could put on his private carriage. This rich person was asking for special treatment, and I knew I wanted to be quite sympathetic to him in the passages from his point of view. He’s stuck there with an invalid wife and a rather irritating grandson, and he’d really rather be anywhere else. There’s sympathy there, but clearly there’s criticism too. Third person is a lovely way to bridge that, where you say what they’re thinking and what they’re seeing, but you can suggest just a bit of judgment when you want to. If you’re switching between many people doing a lot of first-person voices, it can be quite hard to make them different enough. If certain people are all middle-class Parisians, they’re all going to sound a bit more similar. I find that first-person is a technique to be saved for very special fiction projects. Often, young writers think the only authentic way to write is first-person present tense, but that’s just not true. There are a lot of different techniques.

IM: I think also, like you said, with so many different characters, I’d be afraid of having all of those different voices in my head fighting to be heard. Going back to structure, how did you organize the different character perspectives? Did you know you always wanted one to come before another, or did it naturally happen in the writing process?

ED: I do a lot of planning, but I readjust my plans as I go. You can’t introduce everyone in chapter one. It’s just too confusing, so you have to decide who you want first. I think it was one of my editors who said that Mado is really the most important character, so we needed to meet her on page one. At the last minute, I popped in a scene where she’s standing outside looking at the train, about to climb on. With others, I was thinking maybe they wouldn’t get on until later stops. I stage manage it a bit, and I write plays as well. It’s very similar, in which you don’t want everybody trooping on in the opening scene unless it is absolutely crucial. I also thought a lot about who’d be sitting where and with who, because even if all the different people in the cold, drafty, uncomfortable, third-class carriages crowded together, I still knew I wanted some people to see others and have interactions that weren’t too predictable. You get a lot of sparks that way if you pair the atheist with the teenage missionary, for instance.

To answer your question, I did a lot of moving the pieces around. Some characters — real people with very interesting backstories — had to get cut. I brought them onto my train, and I wrote some scenes for them, but I realized that they were just not quite earning their place. They may have been interesting people, but they’re not having an interesting enough train journey. Take Henry Ossawa Tanner, for example. He’s an African American painter who was living in France. He’s on that train and nothing very dramatic is happening to him, but inside he’s freaking out because at the time, he would’ve been absolutely abused if anyone had caught him riding in the white carriages in America. It wasn’t segregated in France, so he knows he has the right to be there, but he’s in a cold sweat. He gets a nosebleed from sheer stress. I knew that his perspective as a train passenger would be a fascinating one. I did a huge amount of nudging things and thinking about who would fancy who, or who would irritate who. For instance, John Synge, the Irish playwright, in 1895 was still just a drifter student, but in his early writings, he sounds like he got so many crushes on women and couldn’t talk to them. And I thought, ‘okay, who will I have him come across?’ I’m going to have him meet this outrageous model from Gauguin’s paintings, and only known as Annah, who is staring and not smiling in a lot of the paintings and photographs. She was a complete ball breaker. I knew he was going to come across her and fancy her madly and yet not know what to say. It was a bit like arranging a party and introducing guests to each other.

IM: When you create and get to know characters and then have to cut them from your project, would you ever revisit them in some way in the future? Or do you just shut the door on them from then on?

ED: Oh no, I easily could. They might be perfect for something else. There’s a novel I abandoned at the 10,000 word mark a few years ago, and an opportunity has just come up, and I’m thinking it might be perfect for that. I don’t ever throw away anything — I keep every little scrap. The first TV show I ever wrote, the producer got sacked for sexual harassment, and I was outraged that all of our projects were canceled too, and it wasn’t our fault. I turned it into a radio play, and then I’ve done it as a stage play as well.

IM: Going into your experience as a playwright, how does that interact with your experience as a novelist? Is there any type of overlap there where one feeds into the other?

“The novel is so good on psychological subtleties, and conversations can be so leisurely . . . when I write for theater in the sense of stage, or radio drama or films, there’s a ticking clock.”

ED: They’re not the same. An experience like the one I described for Henry Ossawa Tanner where he’s just quietly sitting in his train carriage, but internally freaking out, I probably wouldn’t use for the stage. That’s a type of experience which I think is perfect for the novel. The novel is so good on psychological subtleties, and conversations can be so leisurely in novels. However, when I write for theater in the sense of stage, or radio drama, or films, there’s a ticking clock. You usually have about an hour and a half total. Every conversation has to be stripped down. If I need to cut the conversation in a novel down from five pages to one page, my experience in playwriting and screenwriting has definitely helped me develop an ear for figuring out which are the most important lines. Or where can I cut the action early such that the reader will be like, ‘oh, what happens next?’ Our sense of suspense and timing and how not to bore the reader, I think that definitely has been improved by my experiences in theater and film. But equally, when you’re starting to write theater and film, if you’ve written fiction, that’s probably the best possible preparation for making a character really deeply thought through and interesting, rather than a sort of generic type.

IM: I really loved Mado’s character as well. We talked a bit about meeting her at the beginning of the novel, but can you walk me through creating her character and exploring her motivations in the novel?

ED: In a way, her actions came before her as a character. Sometimes plot demands a character rather than character expressing itself in plot. When the real disaster happened, journalists asked the locals, ‘what did you think when you heard that sound?’ Several of the locals said, very nonchalantly, ‘I assumed it was a bomb. An anarchist bomb.’ Already in 1895, people were blasé about terrorist attacks, and the terrorist attack was likely to come from the left rather than the right. It was likely to be a social protest. There’d been attacks in restaurants, for instance, in Parliament itself, and the president of France had been stabbed to death. So, I thought it might make my story more interesting if there really was an anarchist on board who had plans for the day. And then I thought, ‘who should that be?’ I didn’t want to go for the typical anarchist who shows up in 19th century novels, who tends to be a gaunt European, middle-aged and haggard man with a big slouchy coat. I decided to make it one of the young radical women. I looked at the radical women of the time, and Mado Pelletier really jumped out at me. She was so consistently furious. There wasn’t a cause that she wasn’t angry about. She was furious with her own parents. She was furious with the nuns. She left school and she said she wouldn’t wear women’s clothes because they were the mark of slavery. She qualified as a doctor. Later, she was arrested for giving a teenage victim of incest an abortion. She was a suffragette. She was just full of rage, but mostly harnessed it in good ways. I knew if she happened to be on my train, she’d be 21 at the time. I wondered what she might have been like when she was just entering adulthood and still full of fire and hadn’t found what to do with her life. She could be my anarchist. She moved in those circles.

IM: What is it like to create these characters that are based on actual people who lived in history? Do you treat them differently than your own characters that you’ve created?

“The facts are often more odd, interesting and flavorful than what I could invent.”

ED: Oh, it’s funny, by the time I’m finishing the novel, I’m treating them all the same. I’m feeling free to tinker with things. Clearly, I developed some feeling of ownership over them. In the initial stages, if they’re real characters, I try and establish all the facts and work with the facts as much as I can, because the facts are often more odd, interesting and flavorful than whatever I could invent. For instance, one of the guards on my train sounds like a hardworking, mysterious guard, but there was a strong hint in the tribunal investigation of the disaster that he may have fallen asleep. I thought that was such an unpredictable piece. I do find the facts deeply inspiring, but at the point where I’m reworking and rewriting the novel, I often find it hard to remember whether I got these people from history or whether I made them up, because they’re all equally real to me.

IM: That makes a lot of sense to me. Something else that really stood out to me was the line about jumpers committing suicide on railways, and how even if someone jumps or someone is accidentally maimed or clipped by the train, the cycle cannot stop. I have a quote here from the book: “After each such incident, the company has the engine hosed down and polished, then sends it back out, gleaming the next morning because the circulation must not, cannot stop, or the whole system could seize up.” Can you walk me through writing that?

ED: When you’re writing historical fiction, you’re writing it in a particular moment, and everything that’s going on today feeds into what you’re writing about then, and that’s not anachronism, it’s just that you find you hear rhymes between then and now. Of course, if I’m writing about that, I’m writing about the facts I researched, which were that the railway companies put up with a high level of death, and not usually passengers, but the railway men themselves, especially the ones working on the track. They routinely got smashed like tomatoes. That reminded me of every headline I was coming across today about toxic mining, child workers, where the precious metals come from for our iPhones and how we read about these things as customers. We’re think, ‘oh, sounds terrible, but I do need to buy that skirt and have it delivered by tomorrow.’

We take part in these cycles, and they’re often cycles characterized by speed of production, cheapness of production, and speed of delivery. This idea that we need same-day delivery for everything is a fantasy of speed and how it’ll make our lives better. One book I read during the research for this novel is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It’s about how we delude ourselves that we can have a bucket list and a to-do list and somehow get on top of it all. We’re never going to have enough time for everything. This myth of speed can be very, very harmful. So yes, I would say when I was writing that line, I was being absolutely accurate about the railway companies of the 1890s, but I was talking about us now too.

IM: That seamlessly leads me into my next question; I noticed while reading this book, especially as we get to know all of the different characters, that a lot of times, I thought that we have a lot of the same interpersonal issues as these people from the 19th century. It really made me think about how important it is for us to read things like historical fiction to understand where we are today. Is that part of why you write historical fiction?

“It gives you hope that the long arc of justice does finally bend . . . it gives you a comforting feeling that people have lived through worse before.”

ED: It’s probably not my primary motive, but it’s a secondary pleasure. For instance, quite late in the process, I think I was researching what earrings a character might’ve been wearing. I found that she might’ve been wearing entire heads of hummingbirds. There was a huge campaign to ban the exploitation of birds because birds were used in vast numbers for hats and jewelry. There was a big campaign of women saying to women, ‘can we stop killing the birds?’ They won. It happens so much less often nowadays than it used to. If you’re an activist working on something like getting forever chemicals out of pharmaceuticals today, you might feel it’s never going to work. If you look at the 19th century and you see how vast the bird trade was and how people passionately campaigned against it, and eventually they won, it gives you hope. It gives you hope that the long arc of justice does finally bend. At the very least, it gives you a comforting feeling that people have lived through worse before. I find writing historical fiction during hard times extremely helpful. It provides perspective.

IM: I completely agree. I think it can give us some comfort in uneasy times. We can always look back and learn from the past. It’s so important for us to read historical fiction and to understand where we came from.

ED: Yes, it’s not mindless comfort, it’s not bodice-ripping escapism. I hate when people sneer at historical fiction as if everything said in the past is inherently shallow and silly. I mean, if they can’t look past the bustles and the cravats to the beating human hearts behind them, then they’re bad readers.

IM: Finally, who are you reading now?

ED: I was sent an early copy of Leila Motley’s, The Girls who Grew Big. People remember her novel Nightcrawling, which was an astonishing debut. The Girls Who Grew Big is about teenage moms in Florida, and it’s just so vivid, and funny and heartfelt. I came across another fabulous novel recently called Fire Exit by Morgan Talty. He’s a Penobscot writer, and I just thought it was the most interesting perspective, because he’s a Native writer who writes about a white guy living on the edge of a Native community. I thought it was such an interesting, sympathetic and unpredictable way of approaching that community. Those are two recent gems.

IM: Thank you so much, Emma.

ED: Thank you, Isabelle.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.