The Girl on the Train By: Paula Hawkins

Time spent reading: : 12 Hrs.

This book has been developed in to a Hollywood feature film starring Emily Blunt. I have been an admirer of Emily’s work for some time. The fact that this book was a psychological thriller gave me that extra push to pick up the book.

The book occupied the #1 spot of the UK hardback book chart for 20 weeks

Short Summary

The story is told in the first-person narrative and from the point of view of three women Racheal Watson, Anna Boyd, and Megan Hipwell. Fair warning, if you are someone who is going through a phase of abstinence from drinking, please do not read this book. There are plenty of triggers and should be avoided by anyone who is looking to quit drinking.

Racheal is the primary character, and it is from her point of view, we start the story. She is in her early 30’s and an alcoholic. She is divorced and is finding it hard to move on with her life. To keep up the façade with her flatmate, she daily takes a train from her home to London, presenting an illusion that she is going to her office when in reality, she got fire from her job a few months back. Her route on the train takes her past a row of houses with back gardens almost touching the railway tracks. The train invariably always stops next to a house in which a young couple lives, Racheal in her fantasy, lives the lives of these two people, giving them made-up names, developing their personalities, and imagining their perfect lives together. This perfect world comes tumbling down one day when from the train she sees the women passionately kissing a man who was not her husband

Anna is married to Racheals ex-husband and is a realtor in her former life; she is now a stay-at-home mom; they live in the house Tom and Racheal purchased together. This home is just a few houses down the road from the place mentioned above. Anna is fed up with Racheals drunken behavior, her late-night phone calls, and Racheals constant harassment of her perfect little family. She is baffled by how even after constant harassment and embarrassing behaviors when drunk, her husband still refuses to give up their house and move out. Each time there is a drunken row or an incident Tom always covers up, saying he will take care of it, but that does not stop the next incident.

Megan is the girl from the house where the train stops on Racheal’s route. She is in her late 20’s and married to Scott, who is only a few years older. Megan is an ex-art gallery owner who has a troubled past; she is happy with her husband but is restless and unsure of what is happening around her. She finds life boring and seeks a bit of adventure by keeping a string of lovers. After the art gallery shut down, she even did some babysitting for Anna and Tom. Megan has been finding it impossible to sleep for some time and starts to see a therapist to help her out with the problem. She falls for the therapists and tries to have an affair with him; during their therapy session, Megan reveals a very dark secret from her past, which she has not revealed to anyone before.

The day after Racheal sees Megan kissing some other guys, she gets drunk and lands on the doorstep of her ex-husband's house. Racheal is very drunk and ends up with bruises all over her body, a cut on her head; this is incidentally also happened to be the day Megan walks out of her house after an argument with her husband and does not return. After a few weeks, her body is found in the woods nearby, head smashed.

In her bones, Racheal thinks she knows something, but in the drunken blackout stage, she cannot remember. The hunt for the killer and the self-revelations and discoveries that these women go through form the whole of the story.

My Review

The story, in its majority, is written from the point of view of Racheal, a drunk susceptible to blackouts. The writer does a superb job in keeping the writing true to the character of a drunk, omitting critical information caused by the drunken blackouts yet revealing just the right amount of information at the right time, just enough to engage the reader and make the reader turn the next page. The storyline moves back and forth in timelines as we re-live the same memory or incident from the point of view of 3 women, one of them having no link with the other two. The back and forth is not very jerky, though, so you don’t have to keep turning the pages back and forth to keep track of the story. The characters are well written, and each one has a rich backstory. The entire story revolves around a few central characters, so you, as a reader, do not have to keep track of many people. I have a tendency to forget numbers and figures, so at the beginning, I started to keep a rough page with the date and timeline mentioned on it. A few chapters in, though, I realize that it was an unnecessary exercise, and I gave it up.

The writing is simple and easy to understand, the graph of the story goes a bit flat in the middle, and I felt that I was unnecessarily going around in circles while making no actual progress. I am not a voracious reader, and though this may be a technique of writing that I might not know of. Numbing your mind with details and chatter, so you are not thinking about the actual murder but are drowning in irrelevant twaddle. So. When the writer finally gives you some crums of excitement, you lap it up admiringly to get away from the monotony of what you have been reading so far. Just as I was about to skip a few pages, the writing pulled me in. The pace of the story is very neutral, ending with a huge spike and at high. The writer does a commendable job in keeping the mystery alive right till the end. As a reader, I tried to guess the killer, and each time I thought I had the killer or predated an obvious next step, my conclusions were thawed by the writer.

I thought this is a nice book to demonstrate how even in developed country domestic abuse and domestic violence though not in your face, is very much present. This story has two very good examples of domestic abuse victims who take the initial signs very lightly and let them fester until it becomes detrimental.

ANY PERSON who observes obvious or even subtle hints of domestic abuse and does not do anything about it, in my opinion, is a coward and an undeserving to be called human. There had to be more to life than just paying your taxes and dying.