The life of locomotive no. 721: Q&A with author Emma Donoghue on ‘The Paris Express’ ahead of her March 30 talk at TU | About Town

Magic City Books will welcome Emma Donoghue, award-winning and bestselling author of “Room” (for which she also received an Academy Award nomination), for an event on March 30 to celebrate the release of her new novel “The Paris Express.”

In partnership with Nimrod International Journal, the free event will take place at 1 p.m. at The University of Tulsa’s Chapman Hall, 2830 E. Fifth St., and will include a book talk and signing, plus a screening of the award-winning film adaptation of “Room,” starring Brie Larson in an Oscar-winning performance. 

TulsaPeople Magazine had the chance to speak with Donoghue ahead of her Tulsa event. We did a deep dive on her newest novel “The Paris Express,” which has already received high notes from critics and reviewers. The historical fiction novel tells the story of locomotive No. 721, as it careens for disaster in 1895 when it derails at its destination in Paris, intertwining the fates of a gamut of passengers. 

When writing historical fiction what type of events or eras typically call out to you? Where do you find your inspiration? 

What inspires me is usually, though not always, a true story. I can be seduced into that ‘I must write a novel about this’ feeling by a really wide variety of eras (seventh century to 20th) and subjects, but I would say there has to be something odd about the story — it’s never an typical-sounding life, always something extreme (medieval monks settling on a dangerous island) or rebellious (a crossdressing frog-catcher) or downright freakish (a little girl decides she can live without food). 

I have to ask, how much research did you have to do on trains to write some of the more technical parts of the novel? I mean, at times it very much felt like you were a professional speaking from experience. 

(Laughs) Well, I have ridden on a steam train in Yorkshire, but never driven one. I used everything from books about station management and workplace injuries to Wikipedia entries about Westinghouse air brakes, YouTube videos about old train restoration and photographs of a crew at work on their trains.

Can you speak a little bit about choosing to tell this story through the perspective of so many different and diverse characters? 

It was a technical challenge cutting between some dozen points of view, but to me it was essential for this novel because train travel is mass transit — it’s all about unrelated people being brought together by their need to get to the same place fast.

Do you feel like you relate to one of the characters more in particular? 

Yeah, I really sympathize with senior guard Albert Mariette because his impossible task of rounding up all the passengers after their five-minute stop at each station (during which they’re trying to stretch their legs, find a bathroom, buy some food, etc.) struck me as oddly like my own need to handle all these characters and their intertwined subplots.

Finally, why did you choose to make the train herself a character in the story? 

During my research I found I was thinking a lot about the train system in a big-picture, bird’s-eye-view way. Finally it occurred to me that the one who should be talking about things like, say, railway-track suicides, was the train itself, or herself, as her crew would almost definitely say, since men who work on machines of travel such as ships and trains and cars have usually affectionately called them women.