CHANGING TRACKS
How do you follow up one of the biggest books of the decade? Do exactly what you want, Paula Hawkins tells Tina Jackson
Tina Jackson
Chances are that you’ve read, quite possibly in a page-turning frenzy, The Girl on the Train. Along with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go, Paula Hawkins’ global bestseller has defined the contemporary, zeitgeisty, psychological thriller genre, with its domestic noir, unreliable narrators and surprise twists.
The Girl on the Train has sold more than 18 million copies worldwide and was turned into a Hollywood film starring A-lister Emily Blunt, so to say expectations were riding high for its follow up is understating the case. And when Into the Water came out last month, and was a stylistic departure from its predecessor, dark and ambitious and lacking a single central character, not everyone was pleased. But how can you follow up a global smash? Chances are you can’t, so you might as well set out your stall by writing what you want. In Paula’s case, it’s a questioning, complicated story with multiple narrators that leads its readers through some very murky waters as it interrogates the secrets connected to Nel Abbott’s death by drowning in a small town. Writing in the New Statesman, Leo Robson nailed it with the description ‘dark, feminist pulp fiction’.
Paula consciously chose to write a book that was a departure from the Girl on the Train template. ‘I wanted to write something different to the book I’d just written,’ she says. In the wake of her a) runaway success and b) initial critical disappointment in some quarters that Into the Water hasn’t fulfilled the expectations of The Girl on the Train, you might expect her to be a little guarded and wary, but sitting in a Waterstones café on a whistle-stop signing tour, she’s smiley, intense and pleasingly down to earth, using our interview as the chance to grab a cup of tea.
‘I’m quite ambitious as a writer and I had all these ideas about the stories we tell about our lives, and how they aren’t always true – the relationships between memory and reality and truth is a shifting thing and it affects our identities and how we see ourselves. The structure is quite complicated and there are a lot of mysteries. The Girl on the Train was quite stripped down, and a bit more one-track.’ We look at each other and burst into giggles. ‘Oh yes there are lots of train puns!’ she says, laughing. ‘And water ones.’