A review by msand3
The Train by Georges Simenon

3.0

On the surface, this novel is about a man with his wife and child fleeing Belgium as refugees when the Nazis invade. He gets separated from them on the train and meets a dark, mysterious woman named Anna, with whom he falls deeply in love. But the subtext beneath this plot is the way in which war reveals man's truest self. Marcel's life is defined by two chaotic moments: his abandonment as a child during WWI (during which he was placed on a train by himself) and his life's upheaval during WWII when forced to flee his home on a refugee train. We tend to think of the middle part in-between the madness--the steady years of marrying, having a child, owning a small business, and living a quiet, routine existence--as "life." But Marcel sees this almost as a dull stasis. The invasion gives him a chance to encounter Fate, which he does without any evaluative judgment. He accepts his position as flotsam on the ocean of War, and allows himself to be carried where it takes him. I can't say anything more so as not to present spoilers, but the novel causes us to question the paths we choose to take in life, suggesting that the moments of chaos directing us against our will might not be so much "against our will" as we think, and that these moments might be better indications of our "true" selves than the conscious decisions we make during the long moments of stability that we refer to as our "regular life."

While Simenon's novel offers this interesting shift in perspective, I didn't find the plot to be necessarily the best way to go about parsing the idea. It felt too dull to be a thriller, but not deep enough to be a philosophical novel. Still, it kept my attention enough to make me want to explore Simenon's better known crime fiction at some point down the road.