Thoughts on "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins

 

 

Sometimes, while wandering about in the evening, or in my travels on the road, I’ll briefly look through the lighted windows of the houses I go by. There’s no sinister intent on my part, but heir umber-lit interiors look warm and inviting and I briefly imagine that the lives lived within those homes are safer, warmer, cozier, happier than my bumpy, shaky existence. There, I think, somewhere inside, there lies security. There is love. You may do this yourself on your various journeys.

 

The Girl on the Train, an interesting offbeat new psychological suspense novel by Paula Hawkins, opens near this same point. Rachel, the main narrator, an Englishwoman in her thirties, is a daily London commuter whose train pauses at the same point every weekday morning, behind a row of cheerful, neatly built faux-Victorian duplexes. Restless, feckless and miserable, Rachel speculates on the lives of the dwellers. One house in particular draws her attention, in part because of the couple she sees lounging happily on its makeshift rear porch: “They are the perfect, golden couple.”

 

Rachel even makes up names and imagines a fairy tale love story for them. She can’t help herself. She can’t stop feverishly projecting her own desperate need for happiness onto them. Then, after she witnesses a curious incident on that very spot that cracks her cozy fantasy, she decides, at great risk, to take action to save the world she’s created in her mind.

 

Rachel is an unreliable first-person narrator and the peculiar character of her condition is woven with the mystery wending its way alongside the novel’s nicely turned serpentine plot. We also meet two other first-person narrators, two women with similar backgrounds: Megan, the woman on the back porch; and Anna, the Other Woman who stole Rachel’s ex-husband—and happiness--away. These women have their own delusions. How these three threads intertwine until they’re knotted together by murder is the core of the book.

 

Engaging as I found The Girl on the Train at first, though, the narrative flattens after a while. Paula Hawkins is a good writer in the sleek modern style. But, oddly, each of the three women tell their stories in the exact same voice: the same cadences, sentence structures and choice of words. The three seem interchangeable. Add to this their similar middle-class backgrounds and I found myself wandering between confusion and monotony. The novel became hard to stay with. The larger mystery for me was not who done what to whom and why (and the consequences), but why the author committed a seemingly obvious error and one that seems to have passed without challenge as the novel made its way into the world.

 

The only other answer may be that the choice was deliberately made. Hawkins may—and this is a guess--intend to knit all three female characters into one character, a portrait of middle-class women 21^st Century Britain. But whether this approach works in this fictional context is a question I’d say comes up negative. The result is rather wan.

 

 

 

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

 

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Now Playing In Your Living Room: "Justified": A Killing Too Far

There’s this game I sometimes play while watching a movie or one of them new-fangled, premium cable TV series. It’s best with war films, cop movies, and murder mysteries. The game usually starts when, say in a war film, the Young Green Recruit (often played by a third-tier Warner Brothers stock actor) pulls out a photo of the Girl He Left Behind and sighs like a silver moon as he says “. . . and when I get home we’re gonna get married right away and have twenty-four kids and a white picket fence!”

In cop movies, it’s sometimes Robert Duvall--in Grizzled Old Veteran mode—gazing out over the mean streets: “They’re-a gonna retire m’ badge next week,” he drawls. “And then I’m-a gonna get liquored up and go koi fishin’ off m’ back porch.”
 

It is at these moments of clarity that I will raise my arm, point my finger at the screen and declare with Churchillian solemnity: “He is GOING TO DIE!”
 

And die they do. (I’m batting near a thousand here, better than at the track.) The Green Recruit gets mowed down charging the Jap machine gun emplacement; Robert Duvall, peppered and perforated, crumples to the pavement, gasping, “Tell Mabel don’t forget to clean the pond . . . and don’t overfeed . . . the . . . koi . . . aaargh!”
 

My fine-tuned detector for this dime-store ironic foreshadowing hummed to life the other week while watching Justified, the popular FX series and one of the most purely entertaining cable series going.
 

To fill you in fast, Justified is a cop show set in a seriously Californian Harlan County, Kentucky. (You can almost see the mesquite bouncing by.) It’s an old-timey Dirty Harry western at its core; a tasty Elmore Leonard stew mostly flavored by the war of wills and attrition between insouciant quick-draw U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and absurdly eloquent, Nazi-racist drug kingpin Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). Every season ends in a Grand Guignol eruption of torn limbs or bursting bellies. For me, it’s a sleek and welcome anachronism in the cable universe of tut-tutting frowny dramas. It’s cheerfully amoral, like a good spaghetti western, and, even to the eyes of this muddled liberal, the better for it.
 

It was in the first episode of Justified’s sixth (and rightfully last) season that foreboding showed its skull when Raylan’s old boss Art (Nick Searcy), crippled by gunfire in Season Five, warns Raylan, his itchy-fingered protégé, that someday a bad guy’s bullet may well find him. “Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way,” he drawls ominously. Raylan, of course, scoffs in that inimitable carefree Timothy Olyphant manner. Bullets not only can’t touch him, they stop and go around. No lowlife punk’s gonna shoot this tall glass of water off the fence.
 

Then, over the course of the next two episodes, Raylan lays plans for retirement to Florida where he’ll raise his adorable new baby daughter in the land of sunshine and oranges . . . .
 

Casual dismissal of warning about Dangers Ahead? Check!
 

Plan to retire? Check!
 

Plans to start new life with newborn daughter? Check!
 

Rise to feet, point at screen, voice cracking with doom:
 

“Raylan Givens is GOING TO DIE!”
 

As I sink back in my couch (and Missus B rolls her eyes), it occurs to me that I could be wrong—as I am, though rarely—about my premonition. Why I might be wrong lies in the nature of Justified itself—its purpose, tone and action-movie aesthetics.
 

Justified is not at all a serious dramatic show (though to judge from this article, it can be mistook for one). It is not Deadwood. It is not The Wire. Nor is it The Americans or any other cable/PBS dramas you care to name, genre or otherwise, that inspire mounds of heavy prose, including that monument to pompous nihilism, Boardwalk Empire.
 

Its tone is light, breezy, as smooth and carefree as a good fast car on a new-paved country road. This sleek form is inspired by Mr. Leonard’s work, of course. Its comedy seems grown from the comic relief in Sam Peckinpah’s films. Its insolence puts me in mind of For a Few Dollars More. The characters are comic-opera broad, the villains colorfully stupid and pathetic, like Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, “bastards everyone of them!” Occasionally, it captures the pathos of lowlifes hustling to survive.
 

But it’s not about “Life.” It’s not about real criminals. I’m almost sure it’s not about real-life in Harlan County, Kentucky.
 

In Justified’s universe, there’s no tormented drama of William Holden and Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch. What we often get is the Adventures of Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones. Shakespeare’s gravediggers happily rule the screen, like kids playing in a pile of mud. And thanks to colorful, clever writing, slick filmmaking and exuberant acting, Justified entertains in grand gory glory. But it doesn’t do anything especially new and hasn’t a really serious idea in its head, or a deep soul—the very definition of a “guilty pleasure” (whose definition I’ll argue later).
 

Justified is an unpretentious show. And so, killing off Raylan Givens, its hero, in the name of “serious drama,” “high cable ratings” (or so I can say “See! Told ya so!”) would be a pretentious move, a killing too far. It’d be too much a “Statement” from a show that doesn’t make much of any; that takes more pride in its loopy plotting, gory shootouts and bowls of chewy slang. It would be a reach for Seriousness that, by the tragic lights of other cable series, it has not earned.
 

To be blunt, if Raylan goes and gets hisself killed, I’ll be madder than a mule with a bee on its tongue. (And I’m still weepy over the too-soon passing of Dewey Crowe!)
 

But, some may protest, turning the other road may create its own problems. Raylan Givens is a right bastard. Behold as he cheekily beat and shoots people left, right, upside and down while cheerfully thumbing that handsome nose at the civil rights of everyone, including his old man’s! With police-community relations under particular strain right now, allowing Raylan drive merrily off into a Florida sunrise to live happily ever after might leave behind another kind of distaste.
 

May I suggest a compromise? (No? I will anyway.) Let’s say that Raylan takes that bullet after all. But not everyone who gets shot dies. Instead, this 21^st-Century Harry Callahan gets knocked out of the law enforcement business for good to where he’ll be less a danger to the rest of the world. Namely, a wheelchair. One without a motor.
 

It’s a thought. The tall drink of water knocked down to a shot glass of cheap bourbon. At least he gets to hold his baby daughter, just in a wheelchair, that’s all. Take that, Raylan. Ya lived by the sword, pardner. Be thankful that bullet got no closer.
 

Cheer up, Raylan! Maybe you’ll find a new life as Son of Ironside. Call me crazy! Call me excited! But call me! My word processor’s hot and rarin’ to go!
 

 

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

 

Photo by author
 

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up that will appear sometime this year, from Ambler House. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Homework:Thoughts on THE DEATH SHIP by B. Traven

 

 

I read the anarchist Leftist writer B. Traven when I was a romantic, idealistic teenager, led to his classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre by its more famous screen adaptation. From there, I read a half dozen or so of his novels. I recall that I liked some (The Bridge in the Jungle, The Rebellion of the Hanged, Government) more than others (The Caretta). Then, like most of my youthful passions, my interest rolled off yonder, like a passing wave on fiction’s great teeming sea, while yet another wave approached.

What I would think of those books now as a more jaded, ideologically disinclined adult, I don’t know. But now that a mmmmm few decades have passed, I've opened Traven once more, this time for pragmatic purposes: research for a work in progress. The book in question is his first novel, The Death Ship, first published in Germany in 1926-1927.

The Death Ship is narrated by the drifting Everyman from other Traven novels. His given name might be Gerard Gales, but being a B. Traven Everyman, his identity is slippery, amorphous. He’s more compassionate observer of the downtrodden than a participant in their dramas. In The Death Ship, Gales is more at the center of things, a merchant seamen who becomes stranded at a European port after losing his identity card and papers.

With nothing to prove his existence to government authorities but his own honest word, Gales finds himself shunted from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, back and forth across European borders, dealing with a variety of bureaucrats and border guards, some them sympathetic and kindly, some of whom are not. But all of them are just doing their jobs. Gales, who does exist becomes a stateless person—an absurdly non-existent “non-person.”

This section, which takes up about the first third of the novel, is much the best. Traven, with Gales as his front man, nimbly takes us back and forth and around the ports of Europe in a tart satire of governmental oppression as seen in the 1920s. He’s a buoyant clear-eyed anarchist-satirist, frustrated and adrift in what was then new world bristling with new rules and new regulations that grew like weed-like out of the Industrial Revolution, the end of World War I and the growing interdependence of nations. (Not all that long ago, most people did not need passports to cross borders. “Your papers please!” that jokey cliché from corny old movies set in dictatorships, is a now a universal command.)

Many of Traven’s observations are funny: “Always consider your boss crazy and you will always be right and stand in good with him.” Others might raise an eyebrow, including a staunch assertion that the French much preferred their German occupiers to the Americans Doughboys during the Great War—a statement that could use some checking, especially since Traven himself was likely a German. Maybe a little bias there.

But then finally, Gales stumbles as coal stoker aboard The Yorikke, the “death ship” a decaying tramp steamer so decrepit and leaky, it’s a miracle it still floats. Here, Traven’s story starts chugging in circles and zigzagging about. It never finds its keel. From the start, you can tell English is not the author’s first language, but his storytelling skill in the first section overrides this concern. Not so later on, as the novel becomes a frantic jumble, a disorganized and tedious read. It hops and skitters arbitrarily from scene to scene and subject to subject, burdened by poor writing and awful dialogue, as the author tries to embrace every idea and theme possible. There’s telling and gruesome detail galore, but the editor/ translator appears to have signed off by then. Traven is not even unable to stick with his central metaphor and the novel finally, quite literally, crashes on a reef.

Oh, well. We all gotta start somewhere. And then go on from there. And B. Traven sure did, becoming internationally popular and renowned (though less so in this country due to his Leftie Anarchism.)

He may also well be the most successfully reclusive Famous Author who ever lived. To this day, his actual identity, his very life, remains a mystery beyond the reach of the most redoubtable literary sleuth. He covered his tracks exceptionally well. Next to B. Traven, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee look like a trio of craven exhibitionists. Bravo for Traven!

 

 

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

 

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up that will appear in Spring 2015, via Ambler House Publishing. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.