Status
Available
Call number
Series
Description
No one can love her children like she does, can they? With a wonderful husband, two animated kids and an extended family who regard her as one of their own, Ella counts as her blessings. Yet when her soul mate Joe tragically drowns, her life is turned upside down without warning, and she finds that the luck, which she had thought would last forever, has run out. When Joes beautiful ex-wife, who three years earlier deserted their children, arrives at the funeral Ella fears the worst. She is right to. Ella discovers she must struggle with her own grief, whilst battling to remain with the children and the life which she loves. Questioning her own role as a mother, and trying to do what is right, all she is sure of is that she needs her family to make it through each day. Yet when pushed to the limits of love, Ella must decide whether she is, after all, the best mother for her children?… (more)
Publication
Pocket French (1998), 510 pages
User reviews
LibraryThing member strandbooks
This is quite the commentary on the Industrial Revolution and the nature of humans. I kept having to look at the published date. It is astounding that this Zola was writing this near the same time as Dickens. It reminds me a little of the realism movement in the US, but it is so explicit in many
I was addicted to all the scenes about the trains and his metaphors. I pitied the flawed characters. Each character was dictated by a base animal mentality that Zola connected to the beginning of human species. I'm definitly going to read more by Zola.
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aspects (violence, sexuality, denoucing humans as logical beings) that it seems like it took the rest of the world 50 years to catch up with Zola. I was addicted to all the scenes about the trains and his metaphors. I pitied the flawed characters. Each character was dictated by a base animal mentality that Zola connected to the beginning of human species. I'm definitly going to read more by Zola.
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LibraryThing member PaulCranswick
Rougon-Macquart has to be the greatest series of novels ever written and selecting a personal favourite amongst them is supremely difficult. I have read La Bete Humaine, Germinal, La Terre, Nana, L'Assommoir, Pot Bouille, L'Oeuvre, La Debacle and Money and place The Beast Within as the best amongst
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them. Possibly this is because it is the first read. Revolves around the murderous intentions of a train driver and is a wonderful read. Show Less
LibraryThing member gbill
La Bete Humaine, or The Human Beast, is one of Zola’s more violent novels, illustrating his increasing belief later in his career that ‘love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul.’
There are many who have bloodlust in this book. As Leonard Tancock
It’s often over the top, e.g. “At last, at last! He had satisfied himself, he had killed! Yes, he had done it. Boundless joy and an awful exultation bore him aloft in the complete contentment of his eternal desire.” And: “…the only thought in his mind being to get dressed quickly, take the knife and go and kill some other woman in the street.” However, the slow poisoning in a house near a train crossing is memorable, as are the hazy opening scene in the train station which evokes the Impressionists who Zola was a friend of, and the closing scene, with a runaway train that will blindly destroy, a symbol for mankind.
On a somewhat random side note, the ending and overall feel of the novel reminded me of the movie “Runaway Train” with Jon Voigt.
Quotes:
On the railroad, likened to the human beast:
“The crowd again, the endless crowd amid the roar of trains, whistling of engines, buzzing of telegraphs and ringing of bells. It was like a huge body, a gigantic creature lying across the land, with its head in Paris and joints all along the line, limbs spreading out into branch lines, feet and hands at Le Havre and other terminal towns. On and on it went, soulless and triumphant, on to the future with a mathematical straightness and deliberate ignorance of the rest of human life on either side, unseen but always tenaciously alive – eternal passion and eternal crime.”
Also this one, on the progress the railroad represented:
“It seemed funny being buried in this wilderness, without a soul to confide in, when day and night, all the time, so many men and women were rushing past in the thunder of trains shaking the house, and then tearing away at full speed. It was a fact that all the world went by, not only French people but foreigners too, people from the most distant lands, since nowadays nobody could stay at home and all the nations, it was said, would soon be only one. That was progress, all brothers together, all going along to some Better Land!”
On suffering, and the bleakness of life:
“It was just suffering without end, and no possibility of forgetting or being forgiven. They wept together, conscious of the blind forces of life weighing them down, life which consists of struggle and death.”
On sex:
“…there was a little toolshed in which a heap of empty sacks would have made a soft bed. But one Saturday when a sudden downpour of rain forced them to take shelter there she obstinately remained standing, only giving him her lips in endless kisses. Her modesty did not extend as far as these kisses, for she greedily gave him all her mouth, as if merely in friendship. And when, roused to fever-pitch by this passion, he tried to take her, she defended herself tearfully, every time giving the same reasons. Why did he want to make her unhappy? It seemed so nice just to love each other without all that dirty business of sex! Defiled at sixteen by the lusts of that old man whose bleeding spectre haunted her, violated later by the brutal appetites of her husband, she had kept a childlike purity, a virginity with all the charming modesty of passion unaware of itself. What so appealed to her in Jacques was his gentleness, his obedience in not letting his hands wander all over her as soon as she simply took them in her own hands, weak though they were. She was in love for the first time, and she did not give herself for the very reason that it would have spoiled her love to belong to this man straight away, as she had to the two others. Unconsciously she wanted to prolong indefinitely this delicious sensation, become a young girl again like she was before she was defiled, and have a sweetheart like you have at fifteen, and kiss him shamelessly behind doors.”
There are many who have bloodlust in this book. As Leonard Tancock
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writes in the Introduction to this edition, Zola lets the reader watch “several quite different types of murder: the man who kills in a blind rage of sexual jealousy, the cold, slow, poisoner after his victim’s money, the psychopath whose decent, reasonable side struggles in vain against his hereditary predisposition, and various sub-species such as the woman maddened by passion or jealousy or the man with a grievance turned into a brute by alcohol.” It’s often over the top, e.g. “At last, at last! He had satisfied himself, he had killed! Yes, he had done it. Boundless joy and an awful exultation bore him aloft in the complete contentment of his eternal desire.” And: “…the only thought in his mind being to get dressed quickly, take the knife and go and kill some other woman in the street.” However, the slow poisoning in a house near a train crossing is memorable, as are the hazy opening scene in the train station which evokes the Impressionists who Zola was a friend of, and the closing scene, with a runaway train that will blindly destroy, a symbol for mankind.
On a somewhat random side note, the ending and overall feel of the novel reminded me of the movie “Runaway Train” with Jon Voigt.
Quotes:
On the railroad, likened to the human beast:
“The crowd again, the endless crowd amid the roar of trains, whistling of engines, buzzing of telegraphs and ringing of bells. It was like a huge body, a gigantic creature lying across the land, with its head in Paris and joints all along the line, limbs spreading out into branch lines, feet and hands at Le Havre and other terminal towns. On and on it went, soulless and triumphant, on to the future with a mathematical straightness and deliberate ignorance of the rest of human life on either side, unseen but always tenaciously alive – eternal passion and eternal crime.”
Also this one, on the progress the railroad represented:
“It seemed funny being buried in this wilderness, without a soul to confide in, when day and night, all the time, so many men and women were rushing past in the thunder of trains shaking the house, and then tearing away at full speed. It was a fact that all the world went by, not only French people but foreigners too, people from the most distant lands, since nowadays nobody could stay at home and all the nations, it was said, would soon be only one. That was progress, all brothers together, all going along to some Better Land!”
On suffering, and the bleakness of life:
“It was just suffering without end, and no possibility of forgetting or being forgiven. They wept together, conscious of the blind forces of life weighing them down, life which consists of struggle and death.”
On sex:
“…there was a little toolshed in which a heap of empty sacks would have made a soft bed. But one Saturday when a sudden downpour of rain forced them to take shelter there she obstinately remained standing, only giving him her lips in endless kisses. Her modesty did not extend as far as these kisses, for she greedily gave him all her mouth, as if merely in friendship. And when, roused to fever-pitch by this passion, he tried to take her, she defended herself tearfully, every time giving the same reasons. Why did he want to make her unhappy? It seemed so nice just to love each other without all that dirty business of sex! Defiled at sixteen by the lusts of that old man whose bleeding spectre haunted her, violated later by the brutal appetites of her husband, she had kept a childlike purity, a virginity with all the charming modesty of passion unaware of itself. What so appealed to her in Jacques was his gentleness, his obedience in not letting his hands wander all over her as soon as she simply took them in her own hands, weak though they were. She was in love for the first time, and she did not give herself for the very reason that it would have spoiled her love to belong to this man straight away, as she had to the two others. Unconsciously she wanted to prolong indefinitely this delicious sensation, become a young girl again like she was before she was defiled, and have a sweetheart like you have at fifteen, and kiss him shamelessly behind doors.”
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LibraryThing member Moriquen
What a dark and depressing tale about the most evil things mankind can get itself involved in. This is truly a story that depicts the most evil and hidden aspects of peoples mind. Or were they all beasts after all?This is the first Zola I ever read, but it has certainly sparked my interest.
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(Although I think it'll be a while before I will venture into another one of his novels. I need something that is a little more on the brighter side of life after this! :D ) Show Less
LibraryThing member GeorgeBowling
This is a story about steam engines and murder. Not a single murder where the unmasking of the culprit brings complete resolution as in Agatha Christie, but murder in general.
Murder almost as a diabolical beast that stalks the characters in much the way that the powerful steam engines they all
It is one of Zola’s finest novels. It displays all his strengths and few of his weaknesses.
First, there is the immaculately detailed description of the workings of an elaborate institution – in this instance the French railway system in its nineteenth century heyday. Then there are the characters who make their lives within the institution – not as appendages to it, but as believable individuals that mould themselves to their conditions but all have an individual inner life. Then – and I do regard this as a strength, the hint of madness that lies always just beneath the surface of Zola’s novels. If nothing else, it makes them difficult to forget.
Sometimes Zola’s novels seem rather too immense for their subjects – are we really that much interested in the workings of a department store as in Au Bonheur des Dames? (Perhaps we should be, but I have to say that I was not!) But those super-human engines that had transformed society n fifty years or less – remember that steam was described as the conqueror of Time –are a fully worthy subject.
I will not give away the ending. I will just say that it is one of the most haunting in literature.
Murder almost as a diabolical beast that stalks the characters in much the way that the powerful steam engines they all
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work around dominate their lives.It is one of Zola’s finest novels. It displays all his strengths and few of his weaknesses.
First, there is the immaculately detailed description of the workings of an elaborate institution – in this instance the French railway system in its nineteenth century heyday. Then there are the characters who make their lives within the institution – not as appendages to it, but as believable individuals that mould themselves to their conditions but all have an individual inner life. Then – and I do regard this as a strength, the hint of madness that lies always just beneath the surface of Zola’s novels. If nothing else, it makes them difficult to forget.
Sometimes Zola’s novels seem rather too immense for their subjects – are we really that much interested in the workings of a department store as in Au Bonheur des Dames? (Perhaps we should be, but I have to say that I was not!) But those super-human engines that had transformed society n fifty years or less – remember that steam was described as the conqueror of Time –are a fully worthy subject.
I will not give away the ending. I will just say that it is one of the most haunting in literature.
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LibraryThing member ispeaknerd
A really interesting and disturbing book. Typical Zola; deals with the insidiousness that lurks inside us all. I really enjoy reading things in translation, but the prose was still acceptable.
LibraryThing member thorold
Murder, sex and big steam locomotives: what could possibly go wrong...?
This is Zola's somewhat ironic look at the most-vaunted industrial achievement of the Second Empire, the French railway network, and it's also his attempt to take on Dostoevsky at his own game after reading Crime and punishment.
Being Zola, it's the fruit of enormous amounts of detailed research — he not only seems to understand how steam engines work at a technical level and what the driver and fireman are actually doing up there on the footplate, but he's also obviously absorbed all kinds of interesting social detail about how railway companies are organised, right down to the annual earnings of the woman in charge of the ladies' toilets at St Lazare station. His account of driving a train from Le Havre to Rouen in the snow has to be one of the all-time great pieces of railway writing, fiction or non-fiction. The railway incidents he describes in the book aren't things any railway company would want to happen, and they must have caused a few awkward moments for the railway officials who helped with his research, but they are all at least plausible. We get things that have become clichés, like murder in a moving train, the train stuck in the snow, the train-wreck, the person walking through the tunnel, and the runaway train, but we don't get Hollywood silliness of the Buster Keaton/Bugs Bunny type (uncoupling wagons in motion, walking on the roof of the train, demolishing carriages for firewood, etc.).
The murder plot is as sensational as we would wish: the couple who get away with murder but find their lives being destroyed by their shared knowledge of the guilty secret, the psychopath who gets the urge to murder a woman every time he is sexually aroused, but is otherwise quite sane and normal, the young woman whose jealousy pushes her over the edge into committing mass murder. (Incidentally, the psychopath Jacques Lantier shows us Zola's bizarre notion of genetics at its battiest: we're supposed to accept that his perverted urges are the result of the "bad blood" inherited from the heavy drinkers in L'Assommoir, without anyone pointing out to Zola that, quite apart from any scientific quibbles about whether acquired characteristics can be inherited, there's no sign that either Lantier or Gervaise was drinking heavily before the children were born.)
The political message is fairly straightforward, too: with the Empire on its last legs (it's 1869-1870) the criminal justice system is shown as a purely political tool, happy to file the case away if a trial might bring unpleasant details about the regime to light; equally happy to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free if that conveys the right political message. And Zola can't resist the temptation to close the book with the bluntest of political metaphors: a troop-train packed with drunken recruits eagerly singing patriotic songs as they hurtle east towards certain destruction with no-one on the footplate...
This is Zola's somewhat ironic look at the most-vaunted industrial achievement of the Second Empire, the French railway network, and it's also his attempt to take on Dostoevsky at his own game after reading Crime and punishment.
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Being Zola, it's the fruit of enormous amounts of detailed research — he not only seems to understand how steam engines work at a technical level and what the driver and fireman are actually doing up there on the footplate, but he's also obviously absorbed all kinds of interesting social detail about how railway companies are organised, right down to the annual earnings of the woman in charge of the ladies' toilets at St Lazare station. His account of driving a train from Le Havre to Rouen in the snow has to be one of the all-time great pieces of railway writing, fiction or non-fiction. The railway incidents he describes in the book aren't things any railway company would want to happen, and they must have caused a few awkward moments for the railway officials who helped with his research, but they are all at least plausible. We get things that have become clichés, like murder in a moving train, the train stuck in the snow, the train-wreck, the person walking through the tunnel, and the runaway train, but we don't get Hollywood silliness of the Buster Keaton/Bugs Bunny type (uncoupling wagons in motion, walking on the roof of the train, demolishing carriages for firewood, etc.).
The murder plot is as sensational as we would wish: the couple who get away with murder but find their lives being destroyed by their shared knowledge of the guilty secret, the psychopath who gets the urge to murder a woman every time he is sexually aroused, but is otherwise quite sane and normal, the young woman whose jealousy pushes her over the edge into committing mass murder. (Incidentally, the psychopath Jacques Lantier shows us Zola's bizarre notion of genetics at its battiest: we're supposed to accept that his perverted urges are the result of the "bad blood" inherited from the heavy drinkers in L'Assommoir, without anyone pointing out to Zola that, quite apart from any scientific quibbles about whether acquired characteristics can be inherited, there's no sign that either Lantier or Gervaise was drinking heavily before the children were born.)
The political message is fairly straightforward, too: with the Empire on its last legs (it's 1869-1870) the criminal justice system is shown as a purely political tool, happy to file the case away if a trial might bring unpleasant details about the regime to light; equally happy to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free if that conveys the right political message. And Zola can't resist the temptation to close the book with the bluntest of political metaphors: a troop-train packed with drunken recruits eagerly singing patriotic songs as they hurtle east towards certain destruction with no-one on the footplate...
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LibraryThing member Cecrow
Murder galore, in multiple case studies of men and women who kill; their thought process that urges, pressures and compels them to do it. Zola doesn't spend an iota of time on remorse (try Dostoevsky), in fact emphasizing how little of it his murderers feel. If that's not bad enough there's some
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nasty domestic abuse with zero repercussions, a serial pedophile rapist, gambling addiction, loose sexual morals ... generally nothing very nice going on. There's not really anybody to root for. And yet, perhaps due to the lack of remorse, there's not all that much gloom hanging over the proceedings. There's more in the way of romance, actually, with genuine thriller moments mixed in. Zola puts the railroad homework he did to good use in his descriptions of steam engine trains and their workings. There's a leaden clunk sound in their serving as metaphor for his theme, something stodgy in the works, but the finale works up a fine lasting image that I won't soon forget. Show Less
LibraryThing member madepercy
Zola's work is dark and the title is apt. Train enthusiasts might enjoy the historical aspects of the glory days of steam, and the notes provide useful information about the historical context of the politics and pending downfall of Napoleon III. While I have seen the movie version of Germinal,
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starring Gérard Depardieu, this is the only book of Zola's series I have read. While the series of twenty novels centres around the lines of the Rougon-Macquart families, providing a coherent framework for characters, this novel by itself seems to have many characters, where the protagonist passes the baton to other characters as "the beast within" transmigrates from one evil character to the next. One can only imagine how violent this novel appeared in its day - not in the graphic horror movie sense but in a dark (as opposed to Gothic) telling of human nature and the fine line between good and evil that presents itself as choices as we tread along our life trajectories. In Murder on the Orient Express, the reader experiences the twists and turns of an arguably justifiable sense of justice, whereas The Beast Within shows justice to be a human construct that frets against the bureaucracy. In many respects, the story provides an interesting counterfactual theme to Christie's masterpiece, but also Kafka's The Trial. The major differences are that Christie points to the failings of the bureaucracy to bring the guilty to justice, while Kafka points to the bureaucracy's ability to bring the innocent to non-justice. Zola, on the other hand, does the opposite of both. The evil are desiring a form of justice, but the bureaucracy won't let them, and the innocent are not condemned. Instead, the last years of France's Second Empire unfold in a tale of the worst of human nature, culminating in a runaway train that speeds to its inevitable demise amid a trail of banal evil where ultimately, everyone gets what they deserve. Show Less
LibraryThing member therebelprince
"What did it matter if a few faceless members of the crowd had fallen by the wayside, crushed by its wheels! The dead had been removed, the blood wiped away; and people were on the move once more, bound towards the future."
How utterly captivating! By the time he wrote the 17th novel in the
In the introduction to the Oxford edition, translator Roger Pearson notes a contemporary review which dismissed the book as : "Too many trains, and too many crimes". I'm somewhat sympathetic; to the high-minded literary reader like myself, La Bête humaine is treading on dangerous ground, straddling genres typically disdained as airport fiction. Yet the novel bursts with life: Zola's command of character and tone, the intricate structure in which individual human psychology plays such a role, and the two unexpectedly linked symbols of the railway and the beast within us all.
Because Jacques Lantier, the witness and putative hero of the novel, has his own secret: since he was a teenager, Jacques has had a dark desire to kill a woman. To his credit, Jacques has fought against this craving, and seemingly suppressed it. He is thus known as a hard worker who had a deep period of melancholy in his youth, and who avoids women like the plague. But when he finds himself drawn to Severine, one of the suspects in the novel's (first) murder, all bets are off.
When Zola set out to write his series, the subject matter was an unflinching portrait of the oppressive Second Empire, but also of heredity; the author wished to explore the then-fashionable idea that traits - alcoholism, temper, melancholy, even a lust to kill - could be passed down through generations. But by 1889, Zola's scope had widened considerably. Even though we have followed the stories of Jacques' three siblings, his mother, and his great-grandmother, it becomes clear that Jacques doesn't want to murder because his ancestors are Lantiers and Macquarts. His desire for blood is deeply atavistic, it comes from our shared past, as animals ourselves. Conscience and ethics, the narrator notes, are merely inter-generational shared agreements, bequests left to us by our ancestors, who had to fight a brutal battle to reach this point. Jacques has stopped himself from killing, despite the great urge, because he knows it is wrong. He knows it is unfair to another human. He knows it is a despicable act. But the need keeps on building.
Other characters in the tapestry scheme to get rid of their neighbours, take a better apartment, gain a promotion, catch an adulterous rival, please the Empire, take revenge, free themselves from monetary woe. And rarely are they successful. Living within a society has forced us to discard some of the more visceral, more absolute means of furthering ourselves. That is the social contract, of course, and the majority of us have agreed to abide by it. But, the author asks - especially given that few people in this novel achieve their dreams using polite methods - how do we repress what we thought we had given up? We haven't been very long out of the cave, after all. In 1889, globalisation had created a new golden age of sensationalist media and what sells better than murder? Stories of blood and gore were on the front page of every street rag. Early detective fiction was progressing, and in two years' time, Sherlock Holmes would make his first appearance. And of course, in 1888, the media had been handed the gift of the most fascinating serial killer of them all: Jack the Ripper. Yes, the darkness within man was very much en vogue.
Zola makes his point with the powerful symbolism of the railway. The 19th century, of course, was the era that connected us all. Countries were no longer loose collaborations of distinct areas, but easily-accessible, firmly-bordered polities. With the railway came the ease of movement, the flight from rural to urban areas, the good of increased tourism and the bad of everyday demands. Midway through the novel, a train is stuck in a snowdrift, and one of the passengers expresses dismay that he will be late for a work meeting; imagine even his own grandparents being concerned about being late to a meeting held in another city! (Perhaps there is no greater marker to distinguish the "old days" from the new, than the first time that someone decided ships should leave at pre-arranged times on the clock, rather than merely when they were full.) The trains in La Bête humaine are the height of progress but they have already begun to encroach upon our necessary humanity. More to the point, they have created the sensation that we are fiercely modern, when in fact we are still just fierce. From Jacques and Severine to the dead man himself, appearances are not what they seem. Zola's characters are, as always, a salacious and determined bunch, each with their own intentions and sound motivations, clashing against one another. My favourites here include the uproarious train fireman Pecquex, and the "virgin warrior" Flore.
One element of Zola I find fascinating is how, later in life, he became more didactic, more of the old professor determined to make sure his readers understood the moral. Perhaps this is fair; some readers of the socially angry L'Assommoir, for instance, had decried the author as a "pornographer", refusing to listen to what he was trying to say. And so in recent novels in the series - notably Germinal and Earth - the narrative voice has showed signs of moralising in the final chapters. Here it is a delicate touch, but there is a clear sense that the novelist is controlling the characters' lives and adding layers to the symbolism (I'm not sure that he needs to make it clear that a train is symbolically travelling "into the future"). It may even seem absurd that so many major incidents take place near one particular station along the Le Havre-Paris express line, very convenient for his intertwined narratives. In the swirling vortices of the characters' psychology, however, Zola transforms this from "narrative contrivance" to "eerie fatalism". From the first chapters we know two facts - the killer's identity and Jacques' secret - and for the rest of the novel these facts are like trains on parallel tracks separated by a thick copse of trees, veering close to each other, than pulling away, veering closer still, and then separating at the last minute, while we watch, birdlike, from above, horrified yet fascinated by the possibility that they will eventually run into one another.
Both geographically and thematically, La Bête humaine sits in the outer circle of the series. Much of the action has taken place in Paris or in the town of Plassans, and most of the novels have been more explicitly about society's evils, as opposed to the evils that men do. But the Empire rears its ugly head in the form of the legal system, as uptight out-of-towners attempt to solve the seemingly impossible crime at the novel's centre. And in the final chapter, as we saw previously in Nana and Earth, war has been declared. All of the strands of the series have been leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. Now there are only three books to go; Zola must shift from the Empire's reign to its downfall. Perhaps, he is saying, the downfall was inside us all along.
How utterly captivating! By the time he wrote the 17th novel in the
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Rougon-Macquart series, Zola was at the height of his powers. This bloody and psychological thriller is surely one of the crowd-pleasers among his canon. The reader dashes along, spellbound, as we witness a murder from the point of view of the real killer, the suspected killer, the witness, the politically-compromised investigators, and those who hold pieces of the puzzle without realising it to be so. In the introduction to the Oxford edition, translator Roger Pearson notes a contemporary review which dismissed the book as : "Too many trains, and too many crimes". I'm somewhat sympathetic; to the high-minded literary reader like myself, La Bête humaine is treading on dangerous ground, straddling genres typically disdained as airport fiction. Yet the novel bursts with life: Zola's command of character and tone, the intricate structure in which individual human psychology plays such a role, and the two unexpectedly linked symbols of the railway and the beast within us all.
Because Jacques Lantier, the witness and putative hero of the novel, has his own secret: since he was a teenager, Jacques has had a dark desire to kill a woman. To his credit, Jacques has fought against this craving, and seemingly suppressed it. He is thus known as a hard worker who had a deep period of melancholy in his youth, and who avoids women like the plague. But when he finds himself drawn to Severine, one of the suspects in the novel's (first) murder, all bets are off.
When Zola set out to write his series, the subject matter was an unflinching portrait of the oppressive Second Empire, but also of heredity; the author wished to explore the then-fashionable idea that traits - alcoholism, temper, melancholy, even a lust to kill - could be passed down through generations. But by 1889, Zola's scope had widened considerably. Even though we have followed the stories of Jacques' three siblings, his mother, and his great-grandmother, it becomes clear that Jacques doesn't want to murder because his ancestors are Lantiers and Macquarts. His desire for blood is deeply atavistic, it comes from our shared past, as animals ourselves. Conscience and ethics, the narrator notes, are merely inter-generational shared agreements, bequests left to us by our ancestors, who had to fight a brutal battle to reach this point. Jacques has stopped himself from killing, despite the great urge, because he knows it is wrong. He knows it is unfair to another human. He knows it is a despicable act. But the need keeps on building.
Other characters in the tapestry scheme to get rid of their neighbours, take a better apartment, gain a promotion, catch an adulterous rival, please the Empire, take revenge, free themselves from monetary woe. And rarely are they successful. Living within a society has forced us to discard some of the more visceral, more absolute means of furthering ourselves. That is the social contract, of course, and the majority of us have agreed to abide by it. But, the author asks - especially given that few people in this novel achieve their dreams using polite methods - how do we repress what we thought we had given up? We haven't been very long out of the cave, after all. In 1889, globalisation had created a new golden age of sensationalist media and what sells better than murder? Stories of blood and gore were on the front page of every street rag. Early detective fiction was progressing, and in two years' time, Sherlock Holmes would make his first appearance. And of course, in 1888, the media had been handed the gift of the most fascinating serial killer of them all: Jack the Ripper. Yes, the darkness within man was very much en vogue.
Zola makes his point with the powerful symbolism of the railway. The 19th century, of course, was the era that connected us all. Countries were no longer loose collaborations of distinct areas, but easily-accessible, firmly-bordered polities. With the railway came the ease of movement, the flight from rural to urban areas, the good of increased tourism and the bad of everyday demands. Midway through the novel, a train is stuck in a snowdrift, and one of the passengers expresses dismay that he will be late for a work meeting; imagine even his own grandparents being concerned about being late to a meeting held in another city! (Perhaps there is no greater marker to distinguish the "old days" from the new, than the first time that someone decided ships should leave at pre-arranged times on the clock, rather than merely when they were full.) The trains in La Bête humaine are the height of progress but they have already begun to encroach upon our necessary humanity. More to the point, they have created the sensation that we are fiercely modern, when in fact we are still just fierce. From Jacques and Severine to the dead man himself, appearances are not what they seem. Zola's characters are, as always, a salacious and determined bunch, each with their own intentions and sound motivations, clashing against one another. My favourites here include the uproarious train fireman Pecquex, and the "virgin warrior" Flore.
One element of Zola I find fascinating is how, later in life, he became more didactic, more of the old professor determined to make sure his readers understood the moral. Perhaps this is fair; some readers of the socially angry L'Assommoir, for instance, had decried the author as a "pornographer", refusing to listen to what he was trying to say. And so in recent novels in the series - notably Germinal and Earth - the narrative voice has showed signs of moralising in the final chapters. Here it is a delicate touch, but there is a clear sense that the novelist is controlling the characters' lives and adding layers to the symbolism (I'm not sure that he needs to make it clear that a train is symbolically travelling "into the future"). It may even seem absurd that so many major incidents take place near one particular station along the Le Havre-Paris express line, very convenient for his intertwined narratives. In the swirling vortices of the characters' psychology, however, Zola transforms this from "narrative contrivance" to "eerie fatalism". From the first chapters we know two facts - the killer's identity and Jacques' secret - and for the rest of the novel these facts are like trains on parallel tracks separated by a thick copse of trees, veering close to each other, than pulling away, veering closer still, and then separating at the last minute, while we watch, birdlike, from above, horrified yet fascinated by the possibility that they will eventually run into one another.
Both geographically and thematically, La Bête humaine sits in the outer circle of the series. Much of the action has taken place in Paris or in the town of Plassans, and most of the novels have been more explicitly about society's evils, as opposed to the evils that men do. But the Empire rears its ugly head in the form of the legal system, as uptight out-of-towners attempt to solve the seemingly impossible crime at the novel's centre. And in the final chapter, as we saw previously in Nana and Earth, war has been declared. All of the strands of the series have been leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. Now there are only three books to go; Zola must shift from the Empire's reign to its downfall. Perhaps, he is saying, the downfall was inside us all along.
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Call number
F > Languages
Collection
Awards
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1890
ISBN
2266082612 / 9782266082617