Émile Zola (1840–1902)

"When you're young you think that you're going to be happy later on, there are things you look forward to; and then you keep finding you're as hard up as ever, you stay bogged down in poverty... I don't blame anyone for it, but there are times when I feel sick at the injustice of it all."

In the thirteenth novel of Zola's staggering Rougon-Macquart cycle, we are reunited with Étienne Lantier, brother of Nana and son of Gervaise, the pathetic heroine of L'Assommoir (neither of which is required reading here, although the latter is my favourite of the cycle thus far). Étienne, impoverished and unemployed, finds himself at the coal mines of Le Voreux, where he attempts to radicalise the miners and their families into a strike to protect their working conditions.

By now, Zola was at the peak of his powers. Buoyed by a fear that he would reach death or senility before the planned end of his great series of novels, the author found himself writing with a renewed vigour. While he has previously explored the lives of the working classes in L'Assommoir, this was to be a novel about active resistance, as opposed to the "passive" poverty of the former. Although Étienne has dreams for a great socialist state, most of the miners are fighting not for revolution but to hang on to their existing (barbarous) conditions in the face of new restrictions imposed by management. Living in the factory town - with the cookie-cutter name of Village Two Hundred and Forty - entire generations trudge each morning to the mines, children being enrolled as soon as they are able, with the oldies transitioning to above-ground work once the back-breaking labour becomes too much. Their life is one of 'knowing their place', like the heartbreaking - and richly symbolic - horses, Bataille and Trompette, who have served their entire adult lives hundreds of metres below ground, clinging to some atavistic memory of sunlight. And always in the background, the mine of Le Voreux "crouching like a vicious beast of prey, snorting louder and longer, as if choking on its painful digestion of human flesh".

I read the final chapters of the novel during the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic, which was an interesting parallel to stories of families scraping to get by, pantries exhausted of resources as the strike drags on, vacillating between the two great human urges of kindness to others and self-preservation. Zola chooses a different narrative tone for each of his novels, and here his narrator is scrupulously fair. This is not the same voice that moralised on Nana or gossiped about the sex lives of the characters in Pot-Luck. This is Zola the social anatomist, asking the reader to decide from the evidence alone whether the current system is a fair one. The ownership class are either cautiously sympathetic, too removed to be aware of the reality of the situation, or pitying... but appreciative of the hierarchical nature of society ("Doubtless they were brutes", says one such with compassion, "but they were illiterate starving brutes"). The peasant mob is too easily spurred on by their hunger and oppression to commit acts of grotesque violence (the single most stomach-churning scene in the series thus far occurs, but I'm not going to repeat it here). And the extreme radicals whom Étienne admires are - like the advocates of social reform in any modern era - all too easily caricatured by the media and the bourgeois to appear as ungrateful or even spiteful.

In short, there is no way to win. Accepting the status quo is an implicit death-knell for oneself and one's children and grandchildren. Politely asking for more is a humiliating and fruitless task. Pushing for it, demanding it, taking it by force is considered the act of brutes - and indeed, often is barbaric in its execution. (Zola's refusal to sugar-coat the lives and intentions of the poor, just as the rich, is especially remarkable - contrast with his contemporary, Charles Dickens.) Germinal is not without hope, but it is a distant hope, a plea for an awakening. This is a novel of ideas, at heart, although Zola's delight in crowd scenes, dissection of character, and "spirit of place" remain on show. Most of his novels have at least one great set-piece, and here it is the final 100 pages, in which a great catastrophe is recounted in excruciating detail. (As always, the author had spent some brief time at an actual coal mine to understand the intricacies of the field.)

There is an additional note for modern readers, which we should keep in mind. Although set in the mid-1860s (the peak of Second Empire France), this was being written in 1884, the year in which trade unions were finally legalised in what was now the Republic of France. Zola was reflecting on the importance of a movement, although many of the outrageous practices chronicled herein still continued, in France as in other countries. And I would be remiss not to mention a translation: go for a modern one. I read Peter Collier's, as I am devoted to the Oxford series, but what's important is to avoid anything older than the 1970s. You will be inevitably faced with cuts, extreme censorship, or just archaic prose. Avoid it!

Subjectively, Germinal easily sits within my Top Five of Zola's series but from an objective standpoint, it is perhaps the most important.… (mais)

"Sin ought to be an exquisite thing, my dear."

A scathing indictment of Paris during the rise of the Second Empire, Zola here centres his novel around a man driven by power and a woman driven by insatiable desires with a refusal to self-analyse (shades of His Excellency Eugene Rougon). The gorgeous descriptions, running multiple pages at a time, of palatial estates springing up across the city create a banquet so rich it spoils. Zola consciously overwhelms our senses as he examines how the twinned greed of Saccard and Renee exemplifies the grotesque abundance that characterised this era. (Strange, in a way, to imagine him writing this in the period immediately following the Empire.)

As usual with Zola, symbolism is rich and plentiful. The houses are decorated in images of life: fruit and flowers and plants, but which are made of stone, images only of the nature from which they are removed. (At book's end, one character will weep "at not having listened to the voices of the trees".) The "kill" referred to in the novel's title is that which is killed by dogs during a hunt. For each of the main characters, there is a desire to claim that kill - whether it be pleasure, power, money, or something else entirely - but such a goal requires a great sacrifice of one's self.

Zola's obsession with the idea that characteristics and traits are passed down perhaps becomes a bit of a distraction during this novel, especially with the son Maxime who displays worrying (read: bisexual or at least epicene) traits which one feels that the author disdains. And his evident desire to write a novel of the moment, one set in a world with which contemporary readers were familiar, means this novel stretches the brain a little more than, say, The Fortune of the Rougons where only a few footnotes are required to assist with the powerful atmosphere. Here, one gets the sense that the supporting characters are all strongly recognisable types or even direct references - roman a clef - that do not resonate 150 years on.

But that's the dismissive part out of the way. This is an engaging chapter in the ongoing Rougon-Macquart series. The best part is that there was plenty of symbolism even without the author. The boulevards that went up and the complete reconstruction of Paris under the Second Empire were directly political acts. (In Zola, perhaps everything is political.) As Brian Nelson notes in his excellent introduction for the recent Oxford World's Classics edition, they were acts of power - ripping through districts of the poor or disenfranchised, and creating easy avenues for troops to be deployed in the event of an uprising. They were also very much acts of capitalism, both in the way the rich fattened themselves on the spoils, and also in the Paris they created, so much better prepared for the age of "gold and flesh" Zola reflects upon.

Fun fun.… (mais)

"Hélène cast her eyes slowly round the drawing room. In this worthy company, amongst this bourgeoisie which seemed so respectable, were there then only guilty women?"

After the sensational success of his grimy 1877 novel [b:L'Assommoir|92967|L'Assommoir|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309282204l/92967._SY75_.jpg|741363], Zola threw his audience for a loop with the eighth in his Rougon-Macquart cycle. From the broken streets of Paris, we find ourselves in Passy, at the time an independent commune overlooking the capital, in the life of Hélène Grandjean, distant cousin to L'Assommoir's tortured Gervaise. And what a difference a gene makes. Hélène is a quietly independent widow, living with her daughter Jeanne in a house overlooking the city of Paris. Hers is a quiet life, interrupted only by her maid's modest love affair and a regular Tuesday dinner with her priest and his brother. (Hélène's life is so insular, we don't even leave her street until halfway through the novel!)

What unravels Hélène's existence is falling in love with the rather handsome, and rather married, doctor next door. It's a flirtation that may never be consummated, and exists almost entirely in knowing looks and outwardly polite conversations. Building over many months, the platonic affair between Hélène and Henri comes to an emotional climax when two fuses are lit: one, the temptations of Henri's socialite wife, and the other, the poor health of young Jeanne.

A Love Story (perhaps more accurately A Page of Love) was one of Zola's favourite titles, both for its irony (can darting looks across a picnic be considered "love"?) and for its many applications in the story. There is young love, unrequited love, maternal love, and so on. And it feels in many ways out of sync with the previous books in its series. They have for the most part been fierce, angry studies of class and society. The closest analogue has been The Sin of Abbe Mouret which was a similarly focused psychological study, although that one lent itself to fantasy, whereas A Love Story is constantly naturalistic - except in its key setpieces, as below. Although this book has been translated and adapted, it feels like one of the least known in the series, and I think that's understandable. Very little happens here. The author is almost testing himself, to see if he can create a study centering entirely around one person's mind, and the complexities of a relationship that barely even warrants a kiss until the novel's climax. And, in this sense, it feels out of step in a series that is ostensibly telling "the history of the French Second Empire" - until we recall that Zola also (perhaps primarily) wanted to tell the story of a single family, and the way that their genes and emotions (largely pseudoscience now) were passed on, and transmuted between generations.

While I wouldn't include A Love Story on my top recommendations to a new Zola reader, I think it is a delicately-woven, beautifully told story. It's probably an example of a book that would have worked better originally when it was being serialised, then as a novel to be read in one sitting, but there's a lot to love here. As always, Zola imbues every character with nuance and sharp descriptive insight. He intimately tracks Hélène's psychological journey in ways that make her feel a completely lived personage, even if she is neither as ambitious as Eugène Rougon, driven as Florent Quenu, self-deceiving as Gervaise Macquart, or zealous as Marthe Rougon.

Most famously, of course, are Zola's luminous descriptions of Paris. Each of the novel's five parts closes with a languid description of the city as seen from the Grandjeans' windows, recounting perhaps the Impressionist paintings that Zola's contemporaries, including his boyhood friend and fellow artistic revolutionary Cezanne, were creating during his lifetime. The descriptions are glorious for their historical detail, for the showcasing of Zola's ability to create entire worlds out of one setting, and vary his descriptive powers many times over, like the individual shades and tinges created from a painter's palette. They're also the only moments where the novel flirts with non-naturalism, as it becomes clear that the different views of Paris (during a storm, darkened at night, glistening with the blood-red gold of sunset) draw us into the emotional turmoil of our central character and, later, her daughter.

A sad little lesson. I wonder if we will meet Hélène again on our journey, and what others will make of her. For now, she can return to the familial tapestry the author has created, to be found again at - we hope - some more fortuitous moment in life.… (mais)