Review of the Girl on the Train Book
The Girl on the Railroad train
"They are a perfect, golden couple," Rachel Watson thinks, regarding handsome Jason and his striking wife, Jess. "He is dark-haired and well congenital, strong, protective, kind. He has a great express mirth. She is one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty, pale-skinned with blond hair cropped short." Rachel, the main narrator of Paula Hawkins' novel The Girl on the Train, is obsessed with the pair; they represent to her the perfect relationship that she in one case had, or seemed to, before it imploded spectacularly.
She can't stop thinking nigh Jason and Jess, but she doesn't know them. She sees them through the windows of a railroad train, one she takes each morn and evening on her commute to and from London. The couple, whose existent 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 lucifer, they're a prepare," Rachel reflects. "They're happy, I tin tell. They're what I used to be, they're Tom and me 5 years ago. They're what I lost, they're everything I want to exist."
When Megan goes missing, Rachel's world, already profoundly messy, shifts fifty-fifty further off-center. Did Megan run away, or was she kidnapped? What near the man that Rachel saw kissing Megan one morning? Rachel finds herself unable to stay away, and winds up directly in the eye of the investigation, all while trying to deal with her growing habit to alcohol and her frequent memory lapses.
It'south difficult to say too much more almost the plot of The Girl on the Train; like all thrillers, it's best for readers to swoop in spoiler-free. This is Hawkins' first thriller — she'due south a journalist by preparation — 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 non an easy book to put down.
Even the most cleverly plotted thrillers don't piece of work without compelling characters, simply the people we meet in The Girl on the Railroad train are drawn beautifully. The point of view alternates amongst three characters: luckless, obsessed Rachel; charming, complicated Megan; and Anna, the new love of Rachel's ex Tom.
Rachel is a wreck. She seeks solace in gin and vino, ignoring her roommate's pleas to become help. She turned to alcohol after she and Tom were unable to conceive a child via in vitro fertilization: "Information technology was, equally everyone had warned usa it would exist, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, so I broke us." After that, it didn't have long for her collapse to get complete and full. "I went from being a drinker to being a boozer," she admits, "and in that location'south zero more slow than that."
Megan's sections flash back in time to before her disappearance. She's manic and voluble, but hasn't quite come to terms with two extremely tragic events in her past. Anna, meanwhile, just wants a quiet, picket-fence kind of existence with Tom and their child. She's grown to hate Rachel, who'south having a hard time leaving their family alone, calling Tom often during her numerous drunken spells.
Alternating points of view is a catchy prospect; it tin can hands come off as unnecessary or gimmicky. But Hawkins uses the technique masterfully, giving only enough away each chapter. None of the revelations in The Girl on the Train are tidy, and the picture show gets much murkier earlier the mystery is resolved. Much of the complexity of the novel is due to Rachel, an exceptionally unreliable narrator with a tendency to pass out drunk, forgetting everything that happened the twenty-four hours before.
Hawkins' writing is excellent, and also cinematic, in the all-time possible fashion. Her novel doesn't read (as many thrillers exercise) like a screenplay that'southward been wrestled kicking and screaming into prose form. But the story, down to the title, is indisputably Hitchcockian, and in some scenes, Hawkins seems to be paying tribute to the director'due south imagery in films similar Strangers on a Train and Rear Window. The ending plays out like a movie scene — perhaps a lilliputian besides much similar i, though information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to forgive a little melodrama when the prose that's led up to it is so solid.
But what really makes The Girl on the Railroad train such a gripping novel is Hawkins' remarkable understanding of the limits of homo knowledge, and the degree to which retentivity and imagination can become confused. Reflecting on her fellow passengers on her daily train ride to and from London, Rachel 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. Information technology'south hard enough — maybe impossible — for a person even to run across herself for what she really is.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2015/01/13/376167043/girl-on-the-train-pays-homage-to-hitchcock
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