Summit
Review by Walter Cummins
Emma Donaghue succeeds in integrating multiple stories that involve a group of varied individuals on a train ride from Granville, Normandy, to Montparnasse station in Paris. They are united by sharing a particular train ride on a particular day, October 22, 1895. Even though the people come from distinct backgrounds and represent different social classes as signified by whether they hold first, second, or third class tickets, and even though their seating in different carriages means that almost all never interact, they are part of a singular experience.
The starting and end points of the trip are 360 kilometers (about 224 miles) apart, and today the train ride takes three or four hours. At the time of the novel, although it was designated an express, the train started at 8:30 a.m., with arrival scheduled for 4:00 p.m., a total of seven and a half hours. These passengers spent a long time together, crowded into cramped seating in the cheaper carriages with no way to escape a variety of smells, like a basket of oysters being transported for hoped for sales in the city.
Donaghue gives a sense of some of the passengers crammed into one third-class car this way: “Of course, most of these Third-Class passengers, considered as individuals, have done nothing to deserve their fate—the fisherwoman lugging her oysters, the Russian with her twisted back, the maid who’s missing her daughter, the Algerian staggering under the weight of his coffee tank…”
The reference to “their fate” refers to the one overarching plot thread tied to the plan of a young women sitting amid the group. That’s Mado, a revolutionary infuriated by what she considers the abuses of society, carrying a lunch box that contains a bomb that would make a statement to the powerful by destroying the train and killing the passengers who have no idea of the danger they face. Only Blonska, the elderly Russian sitting next to her, deep into the journey, grasps what Mado intends, unsure what to do with that information, afraid how Mado will react if she cries out. That tension carries though the novel as Mado debates when and where she will set off the explosion, willing to die for her cause.
A number of those in the carriages are known figures still in their youth. There’s the Irish John Synge, Max Jacob, Henry Tanner, Emile Levassor, Léon Gaumont, among others. Donaghue mixes fiction and fact for these figures, choosing real names from the train’s passenger list, and inventing fictional characters.
In addition to those riding in the socially divided cars, Donaghue gives significant attention to the train’s crew and the technical workings of the steam engine and its necessary maintenance. The train even serves as a character, inseparable from all the others.
As Donaghue establishes a reader connection with those on the train, she creates a growing concern for each of them. The passengers and their circumstances become more and more meaningful as the novel goes on—what they do, who they are, and what they want. Mado hangs over them as an unknown threat.
The novel is a richly imagined telling of the trip of a historical train on a particular day, the basic story an event already widely known to many in France but probably not as familiar to the rest of the world. In a substantive author’s note, Donaghue fills in much background, including the futures of many of those on that train. She gives the trip a building rush of activities and emotions, accumulating greater and greater momentum to end with a surprise boom.
