The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins)

This is one of the few books where i had watched the movie but fell compelled to read the book. As books go, it was engaging and drew me in till the end, but after i finished it and was thinking about it, i could spot a few plot holes. But what stands out and the book is a must-read for, is to understand what the term “gaslighting” means and how psychological manipulation can destroy a person.

The Girl on the Train is about a Rachel who travels to work on the same train to London daily and passes by a set of row houses. There is a signal near these houses where the train often stops and she gets a sneak peak into the lives of the residents staying there. One couple in particular seems to draw her attention and she observes them closely and vicariously from her vantage point of the train window. She gives them names in her head (Jess and Jason) and ascribes dialogues, actions and motivations to them. One day she sees something that does not fit with her imagination of this couple. The next day she gets to know that the woman is missing and there is a frantic hunt on for her. She feels she needs to tell the man what she saw in his house before his wife went missing as it may help in the investigation into her disappearance. In a few days, her body turns up and it becomes a murder investigation.

While all this seems logical enough (even if a bit creepy), what gets revealed gradually is how Rachel’s life till a few years back, was so much like the life of the happy romantic sexy couple she used to see and low key stalk. Not just that, but she actually lived a few houses away from this one, in another identical row house in the same neighbourhood. Depression brought on by the failure to conceive, worsened by addiction to alcohol created a rift in her marriage till it reached breaking point. Her husband strayed and it reached a divorce. Two days after Rachel moved out, her husband’s lover Anna moved in. Now they live in her house (in her mind it still is) with their baby daughter. A dream Rachel had which never fructified. We see Rachel spiralling with alcohol abuse that also causes blackouts - there are large chunks of time that she cannot account for as she has no memory of it. This has been happening repeatedly we are told, even when she was married to Tom - there were many occasions when he would recount embarrassing things she had done in public when drunk, which she had no memory of and didn’t even feel right to her - even intoxicated she could not imagine herself behaving like that. But she had no recollection and trusted what Tom told her. 

Rachel knows she has seen something that has relevance to Megan’s disappearance and subsequent murder but it is in her blackout period that and now struggles to retrieve her memories, even going so far as exploring hypnosis. While others dismiss her as the ravings of an alcoholic and call her an unrealiable witness, gradually Rachel pieces together her painful memories and realises the truth of her situation and of Megan’s murder. She realises the gaslighting she has been through, all the self blame and regret she holds and punishes herself for, and the reason for the low self esteem she suffers from.

On the negative side, the story is told from the first person narrative of three women - Rachel (the FMC - alcoholic and divorced) , Anna (second wife of Tom) and Megan (the woman who goes missing and is found dead). Each chapter switches from one POV to another and this got a bit much for me. I had to keep referring the the Chapter’s name (Rachel, Megan or Anna) to be clear whose POV i was reading. While they are different characters, they all sounded the same to me. The dates also keep going back and forth - sometimes a few days and a while year at other times. This made the reading experience jarring for me. 

 

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