Zola: A Life

Rating:
Summary: Zola in Context
Review: This is a lively, well-written biography of Emile Zola which I found a pleasure to read, albeit a long one! I felt that the author got the balance right: that is, the balance between descriptions of Zola's domestic life, his friendships, his social and political interests, his working methods and his novels. For a large part of this book, Brown uses the Rougon-Macquart series of novels as temporal stepping-stones, which seemed logical to me given the fact that they dominated Zola's creative life as a novelist.

Zola lived in turbulent times. France faced profound social and political divisions and faced major upheavals - war, labour unrest, government instability, state repression, challenges to the rôle of the Catholic Church, and anti-Semitism to name but a few. Yet France was also producing an extraordinary flowering of culture: Zola counted Cézanne, de Maupassant, and Manet (to name but a few) as his friends. Brown describes these contexts well - Zola was so interested in and engaged with his world, it's impossible to appreciate his work fully without that background: for example, the contemporary controversy over many of the novels in the Rougon-Macquart series was due to the fact that although they were set in the Second Empire, they raised uncomfortable issues for readers living in the Third Republic. Brown also does a decent job of summarising the Dreyfus Case - not easy given the complexity of the matter and the fact that it has been the subject of books in its own right.

I found that Zola's work is of mixed quality. Certainly before "L'Assommoir", but after it, I thought that some of the Rougon-Macquart novels were real duds. Brown accepts that the success of "L'Assommoir" stimulated interest in Zola's earlier novels, but perhaps was not as critical as he could have been, even though I realise that it's unrealistic to expect an author to produce works of such importance as "Germinal" on a consistent basis, and that there might be an argument that autobiographer's main job is to relate the life of his subject rather than engage in a sustained analysis of each of his works.

G Rodgers