Saturday, March 28, 2015

Down the Dark Lane: The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

It’s not a thriller if it doesn’t keep you up all night. The Girl On The Train passes that test well. Paula Hawkins uses the same little trick so successfully utilized in The Hangover series: getting drunk and waking up the next day without the faintest knowledge of what mayhem you might have unleashed. Just bits and pieces that surface here and there, aiming clever little punches at your gut, turning you crazy with their cryptic revelations.
Except, the important distinguishing factor here is that the protagonist is an incurable alcoholic, whose life is marred by such blind spots of the memory. The black outs are the thread that strings the entire mystery together. And the execution is almost perfect. Everything is revealed bit by bit, in a strangely hypnotising backward-forward rhythm. Hawkins certainly deserves credit for the setting and the introduction to the story. Particularly the opening scene with the faded, discarded clothes lying by the railway track. In accordance with the title, Rachel commutes to office everyday on the same train, and as coincidences go, the train stops for a few minutes every day on the same broken signal, in front of the very same house. As is wont for unhappy people, Rachel sketches a fictional, happily-married existence for the couple whose everyday life she glimpses from the train window-- like a movie on a screen. And then one day, she has a fleeting glimpse of something that enrages her, unravelling the happy narrative in her mind, creating a pitiful parallel with her own broken existence. This house whose story she becomes entangled with is just four doors away from her ex-husband’s house: the house that used to be hers. Little does she know how deeply she is connected with this ‘on-screen’ couple, how her life’s edges would unravel in the desire to unravel another person’s mysterious disappearance.
The plot and the pace keep you hooked. Hawkins’ style is clear and crisp, vividly descriptive and moving between the consciousness of Rachel, the protagonist, Megan—the woman from the house by the tracks and Anna—current wife of Rachel’s ex-husband. But here’s the thing—the whole novel is too dark. Rachel is a perennially unhappy woman, obsessed with her ex-husband, unable to emerge from the quagmire of alcohol, unable to get a hold onto her life. You can pity her, but how do you sympathise with her? You don’t see her growing or evolving over the course of the story—until the very end when it all comes back to her. And her constant break downs do drag occasionally. Megan is perhaps the one you can sympathise with, because she at least found the courage to stand up to something in life.

The motherhood instinct is a strong undercurrent to the story, with the three women somehow connected through it. One woman with a child she tries fiercely to protect, the second whose unfulfilled longing for motherhood pushes her over the edge, and the third who, devastatingly, loses a child through her own fault. The three women are also connected in other, more sinister ways, but I’d be giving away too much if I told you what. As far as mystery and curiosity go, Hawkins knows her stuff, for sure. The twists and turns are dexterously executed. to say the least, and the snatches of memory grasped at and slipping again make for riveting reading. This isn’t a happy read, though—looking inside the minds of so many disturbed human beings. It remains bleak and desolate to the end—like a chilly grey winter morn that sends shiver after shiver down your spine.

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