Domestic Noir: Riding the dark tracks to fame

26 May 2015 - 02:02 By Jacqui L'Ange

''I like the darker edge of things," Paula Hawkins admits. Too bad, then, that the author of The Girl on the Train is enduring such a sunny spell. Her debut novel is a runaway success on both sides of the Atlantic. The movie rights sold before the dark psychological thriller went to print - DreamWorks promises release late next year - and in its first four months, sales overtook the early numbers of both Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl.''Domestic Noir" is the literary flavour everyone is hungering for. Hawkins is interested in the psychology of families and society, and ''the way relationships go bad". She had no idea the bad relationships in The Girl on the Train would do so well for her.''I was surprised because to me the book feels very English," she said, ''I was surprised at how American readers took it to heart."Hawkins also feels very English, although she was born and raised in Zimbabwe. We met in Cape Town, where she was holidaying with her parents who still live in Harare. Hawkins moved to the UK to attend Oxford University, after which she worked as a financial journalist in London. There, she became familiar with the daily train commute, which provides the chilling spine, and the steady pace, for her book.Rachel, the ''girl" of the title, boards the train twice a day to commute to and from a job she no longer has. She keeps up the pretence so her flatmate will not realise she has no source of income - and because she is mired in a bog of alcohol-laden post-breakup depression from which she may not even want to free herself.On the train, Rachel sips gin-and-tonics from a can and watches the familiar landscape go by. She is particularly taken by a row of houses whose backyards abut the track. One day she sees something in one of the gardens: a domestic incident that spurs her to action, and into a crime in which she might actually be implicated.Rachel's inability to keep her facts straight makes her the most unreliable of narrators, and provides readers with a compelling puzzle.Rachel's is not the only voice here. There are two other women who tell this story. They are all acquainted, but they are not friends - two of them detest one another. ''I've always enjoyed that in a book," said Hawkins, ''when you think you know what happens and then somebody else gives you their side and you think, 'Oh, it's completely different from their point of view'. And, of course, everybody has their own agenda."All three women are at an age when motherhood can become all-consuming. ''When your friends start having kids and you're constantly reading things in the newspaper telling you not to leave it too late . Although these decisions are incredibly private, they're treated as public property."I wanted to explore that a little bit. How society makes judgments about those decisions and how we as women internalise those judgments to some degree and make judgments about other people."There is a lot more going on here than figuring out what crime has been committed, and by whom. Which is what makes it such a satisfying story to solve. Still, Hawkins remains slightly bewildered by her success.''I don't really know why it did so well. I guess there's a kind of alchemy to it. If I knew I would do it again."Here's hoping she does.'The Girl on the Train' is published by Doubleday, R285..

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