Review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Looking for a novel to live up to that suspenseful-buzz Gone Girl gave me (and provide a break from final-year-essay-induced-anxiety), I downloaded The Girl on the Train and dipped in and out of it as I completed my last semester at university. There had been plenty of hype surrounding this novel (two million copies sold in 3 months) and I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.

Within minutes of reading it, The Girl on the Train had me gripped; the simplistic notion of the lead character, Rachel, commuting and creating fictitious lives for the people she sees on her train journey is a surprisingly effective hook. 

Hawkins masterfully makes the domesticated settings of the novel curious and unassumingly dark spaces; the perfect couples inhabiting the average outer-London houses, and the seemingly normal Rachel who observes them, all hold disturbing secrets. The reveal of the characters' underlying nastiness (Rachel's alcoholism, Megan's past, etc.) muddy the edges of this seemingly fine suburban existence.

It is Hawkins' intentionally unlikeable characters that made this novel an uncomfortable, and admittedly sometimes frustrating, read for me. I found Rachel an annoying character, and I was unable to sympathise with her appetite for drink. I had to repeatedly remind myself that not all characters are meant to be liked, but I feel I have to hold onto at least one shred of empathy. Perhaps this frustration played out because I had expectations of Gone Girl in the back of my mind when I read The Girl on the Train; despite revelations about his seedy affair, I still liked Gillian Flynn's Nick (perhaps this likeability was due to the often comic sibling dynamic between him and Margot?)

My own prejudices aside, the way Hawkins manipulates the readers' perceptions of the main male characters is particularly striking. Tom, Scott and Kamal all move on a spectrum of evilness, with sometimes dramatics shifts in character. 

Ultimately, my main issue with this novel is the way Hawkins presents memory. The plot is driven by Rachel uncovering lost memories of an event that occurred on the night of Megan's disappearance, and at times I found the representation of her 'piecing' together such memories too contrived. The fragmentation of memory does, however, seem a reliable depiction of Rachel's struggles to overcome the blackout she experienced. 

After finishing the novel, I was left wondering about how gender conceptions are subtly explored. Whilst narratives of male-on-female violence are so often reported in today's media, Hawkins' novel does not group female characters in a 'victims' camp and males 'attackers'. The novel alters readers' perceptions of male and female characters' violent capacities - the once demonised characters are redeemed to innocence and the once weak commit evil acts.

Whilst The Girl on the Train is sold as a the perfect fast-paced summer read, it is interesting to explore Hawkins' nuanced questioning of public gender preconceptions/misconceptions.

Image source: Writing Times.

Review: All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

Even after finishing All the Birds, Singing, I feel mesmerised by Wyld's storytelling skills and ability to violently tug a comfortable rug from underneath the reader's feet.

A woman called Jake lives with her dog (unimaginatively, charmingly called Dog) and flock of sheep in an old farmhouse on an unnamed island off the British coast. This is how she wanted to be: isolated, alone. But this peace is shattered by something killing her sheep, 'every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags'.

The novel works like a jigsaw: You trace Jake's life on the British island alongside interruptions from her past, set in the desolate landscapes of Australia, in order to complete a picture of her life. Whilst Jake's life moves forward in the old farmhouse, her Australian narrative travels backwards, and you seek to work out the reasons for her escape and exile. You will find yourself hopelessly feeling protective towards Jake, but Wyld forces you to question these feelings in the final pages with pockets of Jake's distant past aligned with her present existence on the island. 

Wyld uses the brutality of nature to reflect the harsh, unsettling realities of human existence. This is not a novel that upholds the beauty of nature; birdsong becomes synonymous with human pain and, in my reading, the sheep mirror Jake's condition. In the sheep of Otto's farm, especially, we can see glimpses of Jake: the flock are scarred, burnt by the sun, and Jake's scarred back is repeatedly mentioned in the text, as is the suffering and damaging heat of the Australian sun. 

The shifting between two settings is surprisingly effortless; without obvious signposting, the reader finds themselves in the cold, grey and green British island and then in the sweltering heat of Australia. Wyld masterfully builds settings with subtle strokes of atmosphere and snippets of dialogue.

You will find yourself reading the final pages of All the Birds, Singing with your heart in your throat as you piece together the jigsaw of Jake's identity. It is an unsettling read, but always captivating. 

Image source: sophiebroadbridgeblog.co.uk

My grandparent's house and fictional settings

My grandparents lived for 47 years in what was an end-of-terrace council house in Harlow's Churchfield, just a short walk from The Stow. The Stearn family were the second to live in that house - with Harlow built as a New Town following the Second World War, my grandparents and their three children (the youngest being my mum) moved out of London in 1956 to a place promising large green spaces. My mum remembers her aunt Gwen holding the goldfish on her lap in the removal van. Now, Harlow can't be described as green.

Sooner or later they would own 18 Churchfield. It had a hallway, a living room with burgundy settees and pink carpet. For a month of the year the room would be stringed with Christmas cards from the ceiling. Behind that, there was the kitchen/diner, with a larder that smelled of marmalade and a dark wooden table with six chairs with grey geometric-print cushioned seats. Upstairs: three bedrooms and a bathroom. The same fluffy carpet throughout. Later on, they got french doors installed, and they had a downstairs loo. In the garden there was an apple tree and a greenhouse for tomatoes.

I spent lots of my childhood in 18 Churchfield. I would sit at the small red desk in the back bedroom where I kept a tube of Smarties (one for every visit), watch a recorded version of Mary Poppins on Channel 5 on a VCR, jump with a skipping rope in the kitchen (not allowed to do that at home).

In 2002, my Nanny suffered a severe stroke in the nighttime and from then on had to be cared for in hospitals and care homes. My Grandad spent another two years living in Churchfield alone, until he was convinced to move to a flat closer to us. The day Grandad moved they dismantled the greenhouse and he told me he had found something under the concrete. He placed a tiny mouse skeleton in the palm of my hand and I cried fat angry tears. I discovered the Smarties I'd been eating had gone out of date in 1999. Grandad's 97 now and still living in that flat.

It's been over ten years since I have been in that house and I've obviously done a lot of growing up since - it annoys me that I can't quite remember little details about the house (was the carpet really pink?). 18 Churchfield has continued to be present in my mind, however, and never more so than when I read fiction.

It's strange, I know, and probably telling of how unimaginative I am, but so many books I read are set in that house. From the age of ten, that living room would repeatedly prop up in mind as a setting for a character's home. I imagined families that weren't mine sitting around that dining table (the same table was my desk throughout secondary school).

For example, Callum's house in the whole Noughts and Crosses series by Malorie Blackman is set at my grandparent's house. Even though Churchfields doesn't fit Blackman's brief, I made it so it did. I bent the dimensions of the house in my head, and my grandparent's narrow hallway was stretched into this imaginary family's living room.

So many books, short stories and moments in poems take me back to that house, or rather I map that house onto these texts. It is something I assumed I would grow out of, when the house and my experiences there would slowly slip from my memory. But again, at 20 years old reading Mr Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo last year, I imagine the main character Barry to be sat at my grandparent's dining table with his wife's Antiguan friends, eating Caribbean food. In my grandparent's living room I had replaced their burgundy furniture with Barry's white leather suite covered in plastic. I had transported this Harlow house into East London.

But why does this house appear so prominently in my imagination? We of course all use our bank of memories to construct fictional worlds, but why this house? Perhaps I spent my most imaginative years visiting 18 Churchfield, and it's structure has been glued to my mind ever since. Perhaps it was my young mind's way of making sure I did not forget this house which I loved?

Does this happen to anyone else, I wonder? Do settings repeat themselves in your mind between texts?

Literary Links I Love 22.02.15

1. 50 Shades of literary theory: How the novel and the film reflect (and destroy) three centuries of theory

Can Fifty Shades really be considered in the context of centuries of literary theory?! Think again.

2. Suno Takes a Leap With This Wide Sargasso Sea -Inspired Collection

Jean Rhys' novel is muse to Suno designers.

3.  A Guy Found A Homeless Man Reading The Same Book Over And Over For Months So He Gave  Him His Kindle

In praise of Ereaders!

4. 22 Things You’d Never Hear An English Literature Student Say

Accurate right now!

5. A new Sherlock Holmes mystery: is 1,300-word yarn a lost Conan Doyle?

The mystery of the lost Sherlock story!

Literary Links I Love 03.02.2015

Why Gone Girl? Why Not Gone Woman?

(Publishing Perspectives)

#ReviewWomen2015: It's Time To Take Commercial Fiction Seriously 

(Huffington Post)

The top 10 stories of mothers and daughters

(Guardian)

A Short History of the Word 'Serendipity'

(interestingliterature.com)

Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (Verso Books)

Four years ago, I visited Russia on a school organised trip. I was studying Russian history for my A Levels at the time, and I jumped at the chance to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. We visited many landmarks in the two cities, including the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. I remember being so impressed by this looming structure set against a crisp blue sky, naive to the way it symbolised the hierarchical nature of the Orthodox Church and its ideological investment in the Kremlin leadership (Introduction, Michel Eltchaninoff). 

After I returned, I liked to smugly yell 'Been there!' at the TV every time the Kremlin came up on the news. Then Pussy Riot caused a storm in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012, and I yelled 'Been there!' again. 

Fast forward a few years and I've spent the last week getting trains back and forth from Nottingham to visit family before university lectures kick up again. My train reading this week has been Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (2014), a slim volume of correspondence between Slovenian philosopher Žižek Slavoj and Nadya Tolokonnikova, a Pussy Riot member imprisoned for hooliganism following that performance in the cathedral. In spite of international protest, Tolokonnikova spent over a year in prison. 

Prior to the letters, Tolokonnikova's account of prison conditions, and her reasons for going on hunger strike because of these conditions, portrays the shocking realities of Russian prison for women. Forced to work in a sweatshop making police officers' uniform, female prisoners work sixteen to seventeen hours a day and live in constant fear of resisting the prison's orders. If you were to ask for more than four hours sleep per night, you would be humiliated by prison officers. There were times when prisoners were not allowed to go to the bathroom or eat and drink if a warden disagreed with one prisoner's request or behaviour. Worked to exhaustion, the female prisoners alongside Tolokonnikova were easily manipulated and would turn against each other. Before she arrived, Tolokonnikova mentions in the chapter, prisoners beat a fellow inmate and she later died in the prison's infimary.

With these horrific conditions in mind, it is amazing how Tolokonnikova could maintain such insightful levels of thought in her exchange of letters with Slavoj. Many of the letters give the reader an internal look at the philosophy behind Pussy Riot's protest and you get a sense that Slavoj acknowledges Tolokonnikova as his equal. He appears to admire her, for her actions outside of prison and her thoughts cast into letters from inside of prison. Slavoj appears to be truly caring towards her political cause and well-being, sometimes asking personal questions that Tolokonnikova leaves unanswered, choosing to not dwell on her condition but determined to write about what inspires her philosophy.

Despite the linguistic barriers set against these correspondents, this volume is touching and leaves the reader with an inspired sense of urgency.

Literary Links I Love 25.01.15

Some articles that have caught my eye this week...

1) This Character From 'Wolf Hall' Looks Just Like Edna Mode From 'The Incredibles' (BuzzFeed)

2) 17 Signs You Like Books More Than People (Her Campus)

3) Why Asymptote Matters Today (asymptotejournal.com)