🟨 The Girl on the Train (2015) Review - Drunken Damaged Goods | Book Waffle

The Girl on the Train (2015) written by Paula Hawkins

Mystery thrillers are pretty new to me so apologies if I sound horribly plebeian.

The Girl on the Train follows a British woman named, spin the generic name wheel, Rachel. Rachel is a mess of a human being after her husband cheated on her and left for the other woman. Ouch. Distraught and lonely, she finds herself repeating the same habits over and over to try and cope with the fact that she's damaged goods and no one wants to talk to her.

She takes solace in people watching, though. On the eponymous train to work, she watches the same people play out their routines day after day. She gives them names and imagines whole lives for them. Like they're little dolls in her little dollhouse.

Honestly, not a bad setup.

And, y'know, after the first 10k words, I was really impressed. The people-watching fantasy is such a great way to develop the loneliness of a character. It reminded me of Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield, one of my absolute favorite short stories. I'll have to do a write-up on that someday.

Look. I'm a guy that bullied relentlessly as a kid. I get that feeling of ostracization. Granted, my experience wasn't the result of betrayal, but I empathize with the result. That loner tendency to retreat into yourself and playout a story in your head from afar. A desire to be part of society without letting yourself get hurt.

What I'm trying to say is that, even though I'm not a thirty-something year-old English woman, I was willing and ready to love this thing.

But my early enthusiasm waned by the middle. My sympathy too.

The protagonist is infuriating AF. She's a drunk and clumsy. She's damaged goods, as already stated. I get that. I know people like that. And so I'll excuse her poor decision-making to a point. But she does the most wacky and stupid things all the time even when she is sober.

Everyone lies. All the time. And for what? And for what!? For some petty half-cooked drama?

The characters say some version of "I don't know why I did X. I knew I shouldn't," so often that it almost feels like a plea by the characters to the reader.

"Please. Save us from this story!" they seem to say.

It becomes so tiresome, especially after I correctly solved the mystery around the 60% mark and still had a whole lot of shoddy choices left to slog through. And then the author goes and character assassinates the one idiot in this book that isn't scum. Bro. Why? It doesn't even amount to anything!

Mechanically... idk. It's fine, I guess? Serviceable prose. The flow is good. 

The timeline jumping was easy enough to follow, so I suppose that's a tick in the book's favor. It could have easily been a negative. Frequent fast-forwarding combined with perspective switches is a difficult technique to pull-off. But the voices are distinct enough that I slipped between characters with ease.

All in all, it had me interested at first, but irritating characterization and dragging intrigue don't elevate it above mediocre territory. It's a damn shame too because it could have easily been so much more. 

🟨 Rating: 4/10