The Girl on the Train

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This is another of those best-seller thrillers with “Girl” in the title. We’ve had “Gone Girl” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, and probably several others, which all reveal something about the way publishers sell books, or about us as readers. There is a whole anti-feminism female-victims sub-text to this that I can’t be bothered exploring here. Women can stand up for themselves better than girls perhaps? At least the Dragon Tattoo girl had some real guts to her, clever plotting and layers to all those titles in the series. I gave up on  “Gone Girl” because I hated the manipulative nature of it and the characters, so am not qualified to give it a review. 
 
At least this one was a quick and easy read but nothing in it shocked or moved me in any way. With an opening reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”, of a secret watcher who gets embroiled in a crime, this is another typical contemporary narrative in the fractured style now mandatory in fiction with present tense and backwards-forwards time shifts. Unreliable weak and wussy females with endless internal agonising and always saying sorry, sorry, sorry and binge-drinking and loving and crawling after men who are total shits. It is obviously what modern readers clamour for these days. There are more than 55,000 reviews of it on Goodreads and an equal number on Amazon UK and US combined, so summarising the plot is pointless.
 
Although written from the viewpoints of three different women, their voices all sound pretty much the same. There is nothing much to distinguish the men either, apart from the fact one has red hair and one’s a therapist who seems to have a few redeeming qualities. I didn’t really care about their problems. I  didn’t care one of them got murdered. I wasn’t surprised by who done it nor that the guilty individual wound up corkscrewed. If this was some kind of allegorical statement given all the alcohol that flowed, it had little impact. I reached the end of reading it on my iPad with the empty square-eyed feeling one gets when having wasted too many hours in front of rubbish TV. But at least I did reach the end which is more than I can say of the morally bankrupt “Gone Girl”.
 
Of course it has been made into a movie starring some good-looking trendy actors and will make squillions. Emily Blunt as the watcher Rachel will probably do a good job as she always does, but I won’t rush to see it though because I will know who did it anyway. 
 
 
 
Amazon US
 
Amazon UK
 
Booktopia

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