The Girl on the Train

Who doesn’t love a good thriller with an unreliable narrator? The Girl on the Train is exactly this! The first thriller from journalist Paula Hawkins, which has now been made into a great film starring Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train is a fantastic and dark whodunit mystery told from the perspectives of three different women, all of which are unreliable or biased narrators. 

The book tells the story of Rachel, a divorced alcoholic who travels back and forth from London on the train every day. Along the track she always passes her old house, now occupied by her ex-husband and his new wife, Anna, as well as that of seemingly perfect couple Megan and Scott Hipwell. One morning she witnesses Megan kissing someone other than her husband, shattering her perfect illusion of her. That same day Megan goes missing and Rachel becomes embroiled in the mystery as the police say witnesses saw her in the area around the time of Megan’s disappearance. Try as she might, Rachel can’t remember anything she did that night, it’s all lost in a drunken blackout. But as Megan stays missing, it becomes an obsession for Rachel to find out what happened to her. 

Perhaps what is best about this book is how it takes the trope of the unreliable narrator, a timeless thriller technique used my many successful authors including Poe and James, and amps it up to 11. Whilst a predominant portion of the story is told by Rachel, an obvious flawed narrator due to her alcoholism, the rest of the story is split between the perspectives of Megan; the promiscuous maiden cheating on her husband, and Anna; the woman who stole Rachael’s husband. 

All three women work against one another as well as themselves to flesh out the mystery of the story and really bring out its complexities. Rachel is unreliable because she was drunk and cannot remember the events of the evening in question. Megan as a character is unreliable, as we see by her promiscuous behaviour, but also as a narrator as she withholds a lot of information about herself from the reader. Considering that the book is written in the first person in a diary-like way, the fact that Megan is still elusive and never really opens up (until it’s too late) makes her intriguing, but flaky. And then Anna’s unreliability stems from her hatred and fear of Rachel. Her chapters read more as a rant with Rachel haunting most of her thoughts. A haunted, angry, and slightly paranoid character, Anna pins everything on Rachel and pushes the reader in that direction too. 

This technique of three conflicting narrators is really great because it actually works to dissuade you from trying to tease out clues as to what really happened to Megan and so when the truth is revealed, it comes as a pretty substantial shock. 

What I loved too about the book was its tone during Rachel’s chapters in the beginning. As soon as the thriller aspect really gets rolling, the tone changes a bit and becomes less intrinsically personal, but during the opening chapters Rachel’s sections about the state of her life, her thoughts and whatnot, actually created a depressed drunken buzz in me! It’s hard to pinpoint what stimulated such a feeling, but as I was reading I felt the same as Rachel, my emotions actually mirrored that of the character I was reading about. I applaud Hawkins for that, I really do! 

The Girl on the Train is a captivating read; a modern whodunit thriller where the classic tropes of plot misdirection and the unreliable narrator get up-scaled for extra indulgence, I absolutely loved this book!

Author: Paula Hawlins

Published: 2015