TORONTO — Paula Hawkins scored a literary smash out of the gates after her debut thriller “The Girl on the Train” sold 19 million copies and was adapted into a box office-topping hit film starring Emily Blunt.

Prior to the release of her followup novel “Into the Water,” Hawkins was already bracing for the intensified scrutiny that accompanies newfound fame.

“People kept asking me: ‘Do you feel under pressure?'” the British author said during a recent visit to Toronto. “(I tried) to set that aside and think: ‘OK, I’ve got this idea. This is my story. You write the best book you can at this point in time — that’s what you’re focusing on.’

“I knew coming into this book that there would be a lot of attention on it, and I also knew it wasn’t going to be loved by everyone.”

“Into the Water” (Doubleday Canada) dives into both familiar and fresh territory as mystery swirls around the death of a single mother whose body is found in the bottom of the river running through a small town.

Hawkins said creating a story with water as a focal point offered the chance to explore the many symbols — both soothing and sinister — that it carries.

“Having a house by the water is seen as a desirable thing. It’s beautiful, it’s calming, it’s wonderful to look at. But, of course, it’s also dangerous and it conceals what’s underneath,” she said.

“It’s a great medium for an author to use something like a river, which is always changing but always the same. It can link lots of things; it can divide people.”

In a similar vein to “The Girl on the Train,” her latest work revisits the literary device of the unreliable narrator but on a grander scale with about 10 characters inhabiting those roles.

via GIPHY

“I hadn’t intended on having quite so many points of view at the beginning of the story. But it became clear to me because I’d created this cast of characters where everyone’s keeping secrets, and I needed the reader to hear from lots of different points of view,” said Hawkins.

“It was complicated to knit everything together because also we do go back in time. We have flashbacks on people’s memories.”

“Into the Water” is set in the fictional village of Beckford, but was inspired by the real-life county of Northumberland in northeast England, a landscape Hawkins describes as beautiful and bleak.

Intrigue surrounds the 2015 death of Danielle (Nel) Abbott in the Drowning Pool, which had claimed the lives of countless other women in previous centuries.

“I had this idea that I was going to give this place … this kind of gothic, sinister history,” said Hawkins. “Stories build up around it, myths build up around it, and it kind of takes on its own power.

“People are attracted to it, people are repelled by it, but everybody has their kind of view of it, of whether the story is real and what it means. It’s almost like a haunted house in that way — somewhere that people tell stories about and have a unique significance for anyone who’s ever come into contact with it.”

Nel leaves behind 15-year-old daughter Lena, and Nel’s estranged sister, Jules, is suddenly thrust into a maternal role.

As the novel unspools the mystery surrounding Nel’s death, readers get a glimpse of her from the beyond in her unpublished novel about the Drowning Pool.

“She’s really at the heart of the book, but we never meet her. We see her through her sister’s eyes and her daughter’s eyes and the eyes of other people in the town — many of whom didn’t like her very much,” said Hawkins.

“But this was the thing — her obsession with the river and the pool — the only way that we could get to know her was from her interpretation of events. She is very much interpreting other people’s stories. That’s the only insight you get into her own mind, into her own words, is through the things that she wrote. Hopefully, the reader can glean something from that.”

 

Follow @lauren_larose on Twitter.

Lauren La Rose, The Canadian Press

Filed under: Books