The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Rachel rides the same commuter train to work and home each day. She rumbles along the track every day, zooms by a row of pleasant suburban houses, and pauses at the signal where she can see the same couple having breakfast on their deck every day. She has even begun to feel as though she knows them. She addresses them as Jason and Jess. She believes that their life is ideal. similar to the life she just recently lost.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
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Then she notices a startling sight. The train won’t move on for another minute, but that’s ample time. Everything has changed now. Rachel calls the police since she is unable to keep it to herself. The question is, is she really as unreliable as they claim? She quickly becomes intimately interested in everyone’s lives as well as the investigation. Has she harmed more people than helped?
In a genre weighed down by rigid rehashing of the procedural tropes in many mystery thrillers, Paula Hawkins’ melancholy tale of what happens to the survivors of murder victims as they continue living in the wake of loss, with their own pathologies and pathos, stands out as a hypnotic and nimble newcomer.
After losing her job, Rachel begins the narrative by putting her life back together. She is sharing a flat with her roommate Cathy, claiming to be working by taking the train into town each day, and generally eavesdropping on the lives of her neighbours, making assumptions about their particulars, and forcing her idealized desires on couples in the park.
She is a self-hating alcoholic who is approaching the hill’s bend and may or may not have killed a familiar woman during a rage-filled blackout. She keeps looking for those lost hours in the blank spots of her recollections, trying to piece together what exactly happened to the attractive blonde who was reported missing by the local paper.
Rachel makes more mistakes than she should have along the way, including drawing police attention to herself as a potential suspect when she really wanted to help the investigation, identifying the wrong man as the murderer and inflicting unnecessary suffering on his life, and even befriending the victim’s husband, which backfires when he confronts her about her lies.
The descriptions are accurate. Self-absorbed 30-somethings who ponder on their experiences to give their identities and daily lives meaning. Meet Rachel, the character with the largest narrative perspective in the story, who is plagued with anxiety and sadness after being let off from her job due to an emotional breakdown brought on by alcohol. She searches for purpose in other people’s life and longs to meet someone who will adore her plump frame and crow’s feet-scarred face.
Meagan, the alluring blond who is the object of desire for both men and women, is in comparable shape. While Rachel’s loneliness and need are stronger, she is more beautiful. The amazing thing about Hawkins’ writing is how viscerally she captures these women’s dire circumstances. Though virtually dispersed by the medium of the novel, their thoughts, feelings, and point of view leap off the page and into your head as parts of a real event. In essence, these women both live and breathe the written word.
