The Girl on the Train by Paula HawkinsSince the earliest timescale of human evolution, men have been designed to be more aggressive than women. In ancient and medieval history too, it was men who dictated and influenced women’s position and status in the society. Even though, much has changed today, but gender differences, undoubtedly, prevail. The fundamental nature is just the same. It is not a bad thing though, unless, men start to confuse this aggression with power. The purpose of men’s trait of belligerence is protection and embrace. But when they mistake this emotion with power and dominance, that’s when humanity begins to become ravaged with things like power games, emotional disturbance, and psychological warfare.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a psychological thriller that is a paradigm of this, and throws light on how these gender differences can take the form of conflicts and suffering in interpersonal relationships. The book is written in first-person narrative, following the inner monologues of three women – Rachel, Anna, and Megan.
The protagonist, Rachel, is depicted to be a depressed alcoholic and a divorced woman who is prone to memory blackouts and drunk dialling. Her character is self-pitying, needy, overweight, apologetic, and always feeling sorry for herself. But despite everything, she has an active imagination. She is always daydreaming and building fantasies. Often, she wakes up feeling fright of nightmares, and has flashbacks, something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rachel takes a commuter train everyday to London to hide the fact of her joblessness from her landlord Cathy. Each day, while sitting on the window seat of the train, she notices the houses and gardens spread on the other side, mostly a place called Witney Street.
Most of the time, she tries to avoid the house number twenty three, where her ex-husband happily lives with his new wife Anna and their baby daughter. So, she directs her attention on another house nearby, house number fifteen. Every day from the train’s window, she spots a couple sitting on the porch of this house, drinking coffee together. Over days, she starts spinning imaginary versions of this couple, thinking how happy they seem to be. Even though she doesn’t know them, she secretly names them “Jess and Jason,” and fantasizes about their happiness, what if she could be as happy as them. But, she is not.
So, she spends her days drinking, drunk dialling, and hiding her joblessness from her landlord. She fakes going to her job everyday, and becomes almost obsessed by the couple she calls “Jess and Jason.”
But one day everything changes. Her obsession for getting involved in their life manifests itself into reality, and soon she becomes a part of a police case involving the missing woman Jess, whose real name was Megan.
The story in the novel is told from the perspectives of these three women, Rachel, Anna, and Megan. Rachel’s ex-husband Tom is a character portraying a man who likes to dominate women. He plays with the lives of these three women, influencing their versions of reality, through gaslighting, fear, and lies. “I’m a good liar,” he often says. But when Rachel discovers what hides behind his beguiling charisma, she grapples with her own vulnerability, and fights, probably for the first time in her life. She fights for all the three women who had been the object of Tom’s deception, gaslighting, and betrayal. Yet, police dismisses her as a psychologically unstable witness and a rubbernecker. So she takes the matter in her own hands.
The book reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” another story that describes the sneering jumble of agony and anguish that these gender differences can spew in these close interpersonal relationships.
The character of Rachel, is especially interesting, for the fact that it is tough, quite very tough to write from the perspective of a woman like her, who is a flawed and dejected sack nobody likes to be around. Her character remembers the memories in flashbacks that hit her like thunderbolts out of the blue. Apart from Rachel, all the other characters are also brilliantly crafted, something that highlights how their personalities are so different from each other, yet all but the same. Their voices, tones, and dialogues scrupulously follow their personality sketches.
On the whole, the novel is not only an entertaining read, but also a frightening revelation, that love is not always sweet.
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