STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: A famous photo from 1895 is the basis for many posters in the occasional social media meme. It shows an old-fashioned steam locomotive that couldn't stop, crashed all the way through a railroad terminal and tumbled out onto the street on the far side. The novelist Emma Donoghue saw that photo. Her earlier novels include "Room," which is the story of a mother and child trapped in a room, which became a film. Now, Donaghue's novel "The Paris Express" tries to imagine what life was like for travelers on that train in 1895.
EMMA DONOGHUE: An express train set off from Granville on the Normandy coast and headed straight for Paris. It was only meant to stop four times along the route, and it was meant to get in by 4 o'clock, and it all went horribly wrong, Steve. There were some important guests on the train - you know, VIPs. There were three members of parliament, and one of them asked, could the train possibly stop near his country house for his carriage to be put on. And that delayed the train by 10 minutes, which was enough to bring on disaster because the driver and stoker, the entire crew, would have felt under massive pressure to get to Paris on time despite this delay.
INSKEEP: This would have counted, I think, as a minor train accident and not remembered to history at all except for a particular photograph.
DONOGHUE: You're so right. In fact, it's a cluster of photographs. Lots of people rushed to the scene of the disaster and took pictures - amateurs, as well as professionals - but all of them show an incongruous image of a train plunging out a window almost vertically. I don't know how I hadn't come across it in half a century. Maybe 'cause I never was in residence at a university, and it's a very popular dorm room image. But basically, it's that combination of modernity and high-tech and really impressive signs of industry and speed, and then complete disasters.
INSKEEP: You said that you, until recently, were not familiar with this image as a poster and a bit of pop culture. So what got you interested in the story?
DONOGHUE: I happened to be going to live in the area of Montparnasse in Paris for a year because my partner is a French professor. That was the only place we could find a three-bedroom flat for us and our large children. So I Googled it, and the first thing I saw was multiple copies of this photograph from 1895. And I just thought, that's the most arresting image I've ever seen. And I looked it up and thought, why has nobody written a novel about this?
INSKEEP: Now, you could have made up everything except the final image, but you seem, instead, to have done a bunch of research. How did you go about learning about this?
DONOGHUE: You know, I find the facts are often more amazingly strange than anything I could make up. I research things really very much as if I'm doing solid history. You know, I use databases. I use newspapers. I was able to look up wonderful horde of bureaucracy, but then there always comes a moment when the facts run out. So I enjoy making stuff up just as much.
INSKEEP: When you're making stuff up, I'm interested in this detail. Sometimes, writers of historical fiction will say, I make stuff up that is consistent with the historical record that could have happened, even if it - nobody knows that it did. Do you try that?
DONOGHUE: Yes. For instance, I didn't have an individual coffee seller person to use on my train, but I spotted in a photograph in the Paris Historical Museum, I spotted an amazing image of somebody wearing a gigantic tank on their back, full of hot coffee, which he served out of little taps on his chest. And I thought, OK...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
DONOGHUE: ...That is clearly credible, for the time, to have a human coffee pot serving the busy commuters, and what a modern image.
INSKEEP: When you began learning about some of the passengers on the train, what are some of the kinds of people you found?
DONOGHUE: We all know that on a train, there's going to be a vivid example of the class system because people are literally segregated into nice red velvet-covered carriages in first class and then horrible cramped carriages in third class. But I also found diversity in other ways because France was the center of its own empire, right? So you've got Cambodian students. You've North African coffee sellers. You've expats - American painters visiting, like Henry Ossawa Tanner. And you have troublemakers and anarchists and low-lifes visiting Paris. You have inventors. You have writers. You've queers. You've feminists.
INSKEEP: Well, let's remember what railroads were doing in the 1800s when they were the hot new technology. How were they changing society?
DONOGHUE: Well, for instance, on my train, the local makers of Camembert, they were able to ship their cheeses across the world before the cheeses got too stinky. And so suddenly, your man and woman in a village in Normandy could ship their cheeses to New York, and that meant they could actually stay in their village, and they could make money there. So it had a huge influence on settlement patterns, emigration patterns. Trains were astonishingly central to the shaping of Europe. It was the perfect vehicle for a novel because a train moves from beginning to end with unexpected events along the way, just like a novel.
INSKEEP: And I think you're right that it's transforming commerce, but also communication, but also society and where people live and how people work and essentially everything.
DONOGHUE: Oh, and time, for instance. Suddenly, you have to have standardized time zones because the trains were the first things that could, you know, whiz from one state in America to another fast enough that they might actually collide with each other if they weren't working on the same time. So suddenly, people had to start standardizing their watches.
INSKEEP: Did the experience of writing this book change the way that you thought about the next time you were checking email or doing something online or whatever you were doing in modern times?
DONOGHUE: You know, writing this book didn't turn me into a Luddite, but it certainly helped me think in a very practical way about the costs of our technology and our - just our longing to get there faster and easier and smoother - the ideal of the frictionless life. It's always based on somebody else's hard labor.
INSKEEP: If it didn't turn you into a Luddite, what did it do? Just make you try to appreciate all the unseen parts of our lives?
DONOGHUE: Yes, and be aware that you can make decisions. I mean, you know, one of the reasons the train crashed is, I would say the - that the big railway companies, they had an implicit policy of, yeah, go ahead and speed. You know, in theory, the drivers weren't meant to speed, but the company was like, we'll give you all a good, big bonus if you get to Paris on time, despite delays, you know? And any delays caused by the passengers, can you make up that time, please? It also made me think a lot about my own mortality, actually, because the train, again, starts to seem like an image of a human life. You know, you think you have all the way till Paris, but there can be an interruption and a derailment at any moment.
INSKEEP: I am thinking of the popular internet phrase, move fast and break things, which has been repeated a lot recently because of Elon Musk's actions in Washington. This train was moving fast and breaking things. And you note the historical fact that the crew was in no way, particularly, punished for the crash.
DONOGHUE: No, no. These were just seen as the costs of doing business, to use another cliche.
INSKEEP: Emma Donoghue is the author of "The Paris Express," her latest novel. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
DONOGHUE: The pleasure's been all mine, Steve. Thank you.
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