A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins and an interview with Paula about her inspiration
The Craft Review #5 "You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy."
Hi there! For anyone new to Wild Writing with Sanjida, I’m an award-wining writer, who writes historical and literary fiction, thrillers and non-fiction. I write about the craft of writing and I’m also serialising my nature memoir here on Substack too: Wilderness: In Search of Belonging.
This is my fifth The Craft Review. The review is free, and then I delve into why I think the book works for paid subscribers. So far I’ve looked at plot, suspense, and historical authenticity in The Fall by Gilly Macmillan, All Her Secrets by Jane Shemilt, The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson and The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph.
To celebrate being on Substack for six months, I’ve freed this essay from behind the paywall.
I’m also very grateful to Paula Hawkins for sharing her thoughts about her own writing and what inspired this novel, and would love you all to be able to read what she had to say.
You might also like to read our interview with Paula Hawkins for the
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“I’m reading A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins,” I told my friend.
She didn’t show a flicker of recognition.
“You know, the author of The Girl on the Train?” She shook her head. “The Girl on the Train, the movie?” I said, my voice squeaking up an octave. “Emily Blunt?”
And then I started doing that annoying thing of saying, “Oh but you must know! You will have seen…” until I forced myself to stop being so irritating.
It was just that…The Girl on the Train was a proper phenomenon: 23 million copies of the books sold; the movie, starring Emily Blunt, grossed $173.2 million.
A Slow Fire Burning doesn’t have the easily relatable premise of Paula’s debut (I remember being told by endless publishers that I needed to find “a high-concept relatable premise just like The Girl on the Train”): the idea that we have all, at some point, sat on a train and looked into people’s houses and gardens, caught glimpses of their lives and sometimes envied what we thought they had.
Some of us have drunk too much, as Rachel, the central character does. And what a great concept: Rachel thinks she sees something shocking from the train, but no one believes her, particularly not her ex-husband because, he says, she’s always drunk.
A Slow Fire Burning begins when a young man, Daniel, is found dead on a house boat. The prime suspect is Laura, a young and seriously troubled woman, with a criminal record, who had had a one-night stand with Daniel just before his death, and then got into a fight with him, a fight so brutal she was covered with his blood, although she’s suspiciously less than candid with the police about what happened.
The lives of three more women tangentially connected with Daniel unfold: there is Miriam, a lonely woman who lives on the barge next to Daniel’s and who has troubling secrets of her own; Carla, Daniel’s aunt, who is suffering from a terrible loss, and Irene, an elderly lady, who lives next door to Daniel’s mother.
We follow each of these characters, as well as Theo, Carla’s husband and Daniel’s uncle, and hear their stories from their own perspective, as the detectives attempt to discover who murdered Daniel.
"But a bad seed had been sown, and so although everything got better, Laura was left worse. She was slower, angrier, less lovable. Inside her a bitter darkness bloomed as she watched, with helpless desperation, her once limitless horizons narrow.”
Laura in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
There are shocking reveals in every character’s story. Laura, fantastically, cathartically angry, has been let deeply let down and mistreated by those who were meant to love and care for her. Daniel, young, beautiful, talented, is far from innocent. Carla, outwardly poised and calm, has been eviscerated by the death of her child and her sister, Daniel’s mother.
"The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life still probably saw you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.”
Irene in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
Irene is widowed and feels ignored and condescended to by everyone around her because of her age; Miriam, the victim of two interconnected crimes, is also overlooked and under-estimated for the fault of being female yet neither young nor thin nor beautiful. None of the characters are particularly nice or sympathetic and their actions are often morally questionable, yet they seem all the more realistic for the way they have been warped by their pasts.
“‘When they’re born,’ she said, her hand resting on the door handle, ‘you hold them, and you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.’”
Angela in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
The book is set near de Beauvoir Town, a pocket of London where tower blocks and town houses jostle side by side, where the have-nots are daily reminded of what they have not. The pace is often slow, but I couldn’t put the book down: the characters are richly portrayed, the story is multi-layered and complex and the climax is horribly brutal and emotionally true.
“There was always going to be a body on a boat.” Paula Hawkins
So what makes this novel a successful psychological thriller?
I’m so grateful to Paula Hawkins for answering some of my questions when I was thinking about how and why this book works and I hope it’ll be insightful and inspirational for you to hear about her process too (minor spoilers ahead!).
Most crime fiction begins with a body -Daniel’s on a house boat in this case - and ends when the crime is solved (we do find out who killed him) and with at least some of the questions answered in such a way that the reader can, if they haven’t already guessed who committed the crime, retrace their steps and see the trail of clues scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the story.
“She needed to tell him that she’d looked at his latest piece of writing too, that she didn’t like it, all the to-ing and fro-ing, all that jumping around in the timeline. Like the last one, the awful crime thing. Just start at the beginning, for God’s sake.”
Carla in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
But A Slow Fire Burning is such a multi-layered and complex book in terms of the back story of all the characters and how they connect, and as I said earlier, doesn’t have the clean and simple elevator pitch of The Girl on the Train, that I wondered how this story had come to be.
In spite of the multiple characters, Laura is really the central protagonist, so it is perhaps no surprise that she is the first one Paula created for a short story in which Laura meets an older woman (Irene) who has lost her husband.
Laura is one of those characters who you want to love, but in real life might find it pretty hard - and yet you want her to overcome all the chaos in her life and, cheesy as it sounds, triumph against adversity (sexism, disability, prejudice and the state of the welfare system).
Paula says:
“Around Laura I built a little network of other characters, all of whom I see undermine the idea that there is any such thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. All of them have suffered in some way, all have had to come to terms with tragedy and loss. Some of these characters have incorporated those losses into their life stories, their pain becoming so much a part of them that they barely seem to notice it. As I developed the story, one of the central themes that emerged was how the things we carry around with us – which might be tragedy and loss, but which might also be pride or guilt or even love – can wound us.”
Why do we want to keep reading?
Given that the pace is mostly steady, occasionally slow, why does it work?
Well, partly because the characters are so well portrayed, and partly because of the nested set of reveals for each person.
Laura, for instance, had an accident as a child, which is responsible for some of her odd behaviour - laughing wildly and inappropriately in a police officer’s face even when she realises the gravity of the situation; or being unable to control her impulses to the extent that when assaulted in a bar, she stabs the man through his hand with a fork.
We keep returning to Laura’s past, stripping away layers, each reveal more shocking and sadder than before, until you want to wrap Laura up in a cuddly fleecy dressing gown and take her home, except that she’d probably laugh in your face, call you an interfering bitch and steal your handbag, waking up the next day in the ruin of her own flat to regret it all.
There are very few clues to the actual murder; we see little of any police work, or traditional crime fiction crime-solving. Instead, we have this proper psychological underpinning to the crime - we discover how everyone involved thinks and feels until we understand what their motive for murder might have been. In fact, the only person who would stereotypically be classed as evil and diagnosed as a psychopath in the novel is not even involved in Daniel’s murder at all.
It’s part of the zest-geist
Fiction goes through cycles as society changes: when The Girl on the Train was published in 2015 we were in a phase of brilliantly-portrayed and magnificently unreliable narrators, such as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Gaby Mortimer in Under your Skin by Sabine Durrant, and Yvonne Carmichael in Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty.
During the pandemic, we veered towards cosy crime, propelling Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club) and SJ Bennett (Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series), to fame. This is not to say that we don’t still love unreliable narrators and cosy crime (maybe together - new genre!), but I think we are entering an era of cross-genre immersive fiction, where we wish to deeply embed ourselves in other lives and other worlds, no matter how uncomfortable they might be, and for a short while, escape the energy bills, the food crisis, war in Ukraine and climate change.
Indeed, Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton, told The Bookseller that his first submission of the year was a 650-page novel, adding: “Perhaps multi-layered immersion in a book of depth, texture and human complexity is what we all need right now.”
What drives the story?
The engine that drives the novel, or rather the match that ignites it, is this:
“Would Miriam or Laura or Carla be prepared to burn everything to the ground in order to right a past wrong? From this starting point, I began to build my plot, intentionally allowing my cast of characters to collide in ways that were both bruising and healing: a habit which has become both theme and strategy for me as a novelist.” Paula Hawkins
And every novel needs this, a literal force that pushes the novel forwards, the what if… that drives through the core of a work of fiction, propelling the reader to the last page. In psychological thrillers particularly, where we often know what the characters think and feel and where there is always the under current of violence, we also want to know what will they do - and what would I do if I were in that situation?
“We live in a deeply unequal society that is getting more unequal all the time: it is not difficult to imagine how enraging this must be for people in difficult circumstances who feel powerless to change their fate – people just like Miriam, or Laura.” Paula Hawkins
What are the themes in the novel?
Finally, I wanted to touch on one of the themes. As I’ve mentioned, there are themes that revolve around misogyny, poverty, morality and how the damage in our past can warp our present; but another theme that is not as common in commercial crime fiction is this - the idea of art and who owns it.
Theo, Carla’s husband and Daniel’s uncle, is a writer. He’s written in different genres, but his most commercially successful book was a crime novel. It’s not unprecedented for crime fiction and thrillers to feature writers - think of Misery and The Shining by Stephen King, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.
In A Slow Fire Burning Theo’s book is based on Miriam’s memoir, which is about a horrific experience she had as a teenager. She gives him the manuscript to read for feedback, but he steals her idea and turns it into a best-selling novel. He denies he’s taken her manuscript and her story and his lawyers humiliate her.
“Miriam had lost the talent for friendship when she was young, and once gone, it was a difficult thing to recover. Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.”
Miriam in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
What’s devastating for Miriam is that Theo writes from the point of view of her abductor, and accuses her of cowardice for managing to escape, leaving her friend behind, who is raped and murdered.
“He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.”
Theo in A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
This is extreme, obviously, but there is a blurring of the lines between life and art, as Paula points out, when describing her creative process:
"What a writer could or should be permitted to take and transform into art is one of the questions at the heart of A Slow Fire Burning. I borrow from life and the lives around me all the time: what happens to Laura when she is a child is a – significantly altered – version of something which happened to a friend of a friend of a friend; what Miriam suffers was inspired by a story I read in a newspaper several years ago.”
Most writers recognise this ability to take - to draw on one’s own experiences, cannibalise one’s own feelings, the experiences of others, what we read about in the media, what has happened in the past, what people tell us, what we overhear. And of course we embellish, but as Graham Greene so memorably put it, “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” And I think as writers, we all recognise that glacial darkness in ourselves.
“Why do we have the right to take from life, but not from art? Do we? Are there limits to that? I have a partial answer to that question which, fittingly enough, I have stolen from another writer. In a recent essay, Nicole Krauss wrote that characters “wash up on our shores as dead bodies, they arrive from who knows where or why, and as the years pass, we attempt to breathe life into them”. Whether it be reanimation or transformation, what the writer does must be to create something new.” Paula Hawkins
Indeed. And now all I can think of is Frankenstein’s monster. Am I the monster?
Or am I Frankenstein?
Let me know what you think. What do you think of A Slow Fire Burning?
What rights to you think writers and other artists have to adapt other lives, and other stories to turn them into art?
Sanjida x