BOOK REVIEW - EMILE ZOLA – GERMINAL (1895) PENGUIN CLASSICS.
Ettiene Lantier, fired from a previous job for failing control his innate violent temper, gets work in a large impoverished mining community. He is afraid of getting into a fight again, especially as a relative murdered someone (In Zola’s novel, Le Bete Humaine). Life in the mine is harsh and dangerous. The heat is unbearable. The danger of methane explosions runs high and the shafts tend to collapse due to being poorly supported by old rotting pit props. Women and children serve in the pit, as do horses, which have not seen the open air since their infancy. The pit management are bourgeoisie and effete. Requests for more time spared for installing better pit props are ignored with tragic consequences. Ettiene, though new to the job, becomes rebellious over it. He takes lodgings in a bar owned by another minor who wants to negotiate peacefully for a settlement on the pit props issue. Ettiene is more for strike action, while a third man wants to commit acts of anarchy. (He has previously blown up a train, killing its passengers and his own lover). Etienne falls for a girl who works in the mine, but she has another suitor, who is a drunken violent thug. Ettiene worries that he may come to blows with the brute sooner or later. The strike actually breaks out, but it quickly gets out of control. Women castrate a local storekeeper who has been sexually abusing their daughters for years. They carry his severed penis around the town on a pike. Eventually the army are called in, and some miners, including Etienne go back to work, as they are now starving. The anarchist sees them as blacklegs and blows up the mine, causing pit collapse and flood. Ettiene, his girlfriend and the thug who Ettiene despises are trapped together in a flooding chamber with a small pocket of air. Zola’s description of the drowning horses is one of the most gut wrenching moments of horror in literature. Ettiene kills the other man, and makes love to the girl, as the body of the other man bobs against their feet. The girl soon dies of the cold, but a concentrated rescue effort by the now united community saves Ettiene. As he is found, the entire pit housing collapses in spectacular style as if in an earthquake into the ground, ruining the entire business. Ettiene leaves the town as its people pick up their lives to start again. Ettiene thinks of suppressed humanity literally germinating through the rock like flowers fighting towards sunlight, which is the reason for the book’s title. It’s a powerful look at three kinds of revolutionary, divided in their approaches to the same goal, and how people are drawn together by tragedy and hardship. One of the most compulsive unputdownable books of the 19th century. The feel of the mines is so authentic you can smell it. Zola went down pits himself to research the book, and it really shows. http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/zola/zola.htm
Arthur Chappell
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