Review: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, Paula Hawkins - audio book

• Narrated by: Clare Corbett, India Fisher, Louise Brealey
• Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins 
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Release Date: 15 January 2015
• Publisher: Random House Audiobooks
• debut title
• available from Audible 

Synopsis  (Audible)

Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy.

And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she's only watched from afar. Now they'll see; she's much more than just the girl on the train...

My Take:

This story is told by three narrators who identify themselves at the beginning of a chapter by just saying their name. The producer of the audio version has replicated these narrators by using three  readers with distinct voices. That means "reading" it as an audio novel is probably not the best strategy, particularly as the time frame zig zags, with some narrators playing "catch up", so the reader is really never sure when events occurred, in relation to each other. With an audio novel you don't have the opportunity that a hard copy gives you of being able to flip back a few pages to check on a date or who is speaking. I suspect that if I had been reading a hard copy I might even have been tempted to write dates down and group events around them.

Add to that the fact that the principal narrator, Rachel, who is the "girl on the train", is an alcoholic and is frequently drunk. The police sum it up when they say that her evidence is unreliable. Rachel herself is the first to admit this because there are great holes in her memory. She has flashbacks in the form of dreams, and she is never sure whether they are things she has actually seen or whether it is her imagination at work. However as she begins to "dry out" bits of her memory returns. All she has to do is work out which memories to trust.

Rachel has lost her job in London because she came back from lunch drunk, having insulted one of her firm's biggest clients. She has been keeping up the pretence of going to work on the train so her flatmate will not know that she has no income.  She desperately wants to be accepted by people, and to overcome her feelings of rejection by her ex-husband. At night when she is drunk she tends to ring him in the middle of the night and even turns up at his house, where she also used to live, and frightens his new wife by taking their baby out of the bassinet. Just coincidentally their house is just a few doors down from the house where "Jess and Jason" live.

And then she sees something from the train which changes all their lives forever.

So it is a novel that really makes the reader work alongside Rachel at solving the mystery.

A number of reviewers have remarked on what a remarkable accomplishment the novel is, and I tend to agree. I have to list it among my best reads for this year.

My rating: 4.9

About the author
Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction.
Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. The Girl on the Train is her first thriller.