When an express train smashes through the barriers at Montparnasse, screeches across the concourse and emerges through an exterior wall, panicked onlookers assume it’s a terrorist attack. Plus ça change; this happened in October 1895 and is the inspiration for Emma Donoghue’s new novel, which takes place on that train as it hurtles from Granville to Paris.

Donoghue specialises in contained settings. She is best known for the 2010 novel Room, narrated by a child who has been raised in a single room by his kidnapped mother. The Wonder is set mostly in a cramped 19th-century rural Irish cottage, then in 2020 came The Pull of the Stars, located, with eerie prescience, in the pandemic isolation ward of a Dublin maternity hospital in 1918. Most recently, there was 2022’s Haven, where Donoghue isolates three seventh-century monks on a speck of rock in the Irish Sea.

A 19th-century express train is a neat way to contain a bigger slice of life, a social history with passengers pre-divided into first, second and third class (third at the front, naturally, to absorb coal dust and the impact of possible collisions). Each carriage is “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random”. And as the maids and anarchists, artists and playwrights, medics, engineers and politicians mingle, we glimpse issues of race, sexuality and poverty through concerns ranging from the petty (bad smells, needing the loo) to the cataclysmic (impending childbirth, possible mass murder).

The passenger we spend most time with is an angry young class warrior, Mado, “upright as a toy soldier in a straight skirt, a collar and tie, brilliantined hair cut to just below the ears”. Early on, we discover that the lunch bucket she clutches might contain something more sinister than sandwiches. Blonska, an elderly Russian in gauzy hand-me-downs, is the only one to clock this. We also meet 22-year-old Marcelle, a half-Cuban medical student who can’t resist diagnosing her fellow passenger, a sick 18-year-old girl who bruises easily and suffers night sweats. In another carriage we find Alice Guy, secretary at the photographic company Gaumont, trying to convince her dull boss that the Lumière brothers’ technique of stringing images together has more than documentary potential; it could be “something really captivating”.

This train, then, contains real historical figures. Some (the politicians and the crew) were indeed there; others, as Donoghue writes in an afterword, are “plausible guests”. These include Irish playwright John Synge, seen scribbling in a notebook, and one-armed civil engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe, who tells his fellow travellers, husband and wife Émile Levassor and Louise Sarazin-Levassor, about his plan for underground electrified trains in Paris. Levassor, a motorcar enthusiast, pooh-poohs this ludicrous notion; in 10 years, he says, everyone will have a motorcar. (The real Émile, Donoghue’s note tells us, pioneered the motorcar industry, and Louise became “Mother of the Motorcar” after he died from – yes – car crash injuries.)

These knowing winks are fun, if a little pantomimic. There is a sense of people swapping historically pertinent information. Showgirl Annah, once an artist’s model, tells Synge how one painter, Gauguin, treated her badly so she sold all his belongings, except the “stupid pictures” no one would buy. In less skilled hands, all these characters might become a roster of types, or simply meld, but Donoghue is too deft and intelligent to let us lose our way, giving them props – hummingbird earrings, a bucket of oysters, a wooden arm – so that we may move in and out of carriages and still recognise people.

Very occasionally, a more intriguing consciousness muscles in: the train itself. “Since Granville, Engine 721 has been scenting danger somewhere along her flanks.” This is curious, unexpected, and has weird potential. I longed for more.

But there is no time for that. The form offers frustratingly limited scope for character complexity or nuance. Instead, there is a lively Agatha Christie feel, with potted biographies and neat social commentary fuelled by the key question: can anyone survive this? As Engine 721 clatters towards Paris, we bounce between stories while Mado’s lunch bucket provides what Blonska calls the “agony of this suspense”. But Donoghue’s central concern is more existential. It is almost Beckettian, really, this vision of life as individuals crammed into metal containers, enduring clanking discomforts and talking at each other as they move towards the inevitable end. The real question is human and timeless and, frankly, rather apposite. As Blonska puts it: “How to carry on minute by minute, when you don’t know how long you’ve got.”