The Girl on the Train

‘There is nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion’ - Anna

Everyday Rachel takes the same train into London. Each day the train stops at the same signal and allows her to look into the picture perfect house and couple that she loves and envies. But one day she looks up and her picture is ruined and she has to find out why.

Despite the success of Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel I have been able to read the book while knowing little to nothing about it. While it isn’t necessarily the detective novel I was expecting, it is instead a well written domestic noir focused on the lives of three women Rachel, Megan and Anna.

Rachel, the principal narrator, is someone I had a love hate relationship with because as much she contributed to her own downfall I still wanted her to succeed and internally yelled at her as I learnt of each of her stupid decisions.

Stupid or not they created suspense and momentum in the book but sadly this suspense died for me at the most pivotal moment of any book, the ending. The diary format did do well in maintaining the suspense of the novel as when the days of each narrator began to intertwine or reveal information about the other it I became increasingly worried about their safety.

Though the ending is interesting and not quite expected as the persona of a few characters change, it didn’t give the same unique feel as the rest of the book and I felt that I continued to read the book just to finish it rather to enjoy the story. It did, like the rest of the novel create cinematic images in my mind but this is something I do all too often and something that I also somewhat dislike about the film industry, that we can’t just let a book be a book but put it in so many other categories. Although this can be a natural and successful choice it is also always motivated by money and takes away from the art.

I began reading this under the belief that there was an unreliable narrator and after being caught out by Christie, I was determined to not let that happen again. Every piece of information given throughout the novel I scrutinised and thought too deeply about but to no avail. I didn’t feel completely cheated though but felt more that Rachel and I were figuring it out (and failing) together. But trying so hard to outsmart Hawkins made me engage with the text more actively than I have done recently, giving the novel a place within my favourites.