Staff Pick: Germinal by Émile Zola
Published on 11th April 2024
Émile Zola’s Germinal tells the story of an impoverished French mining village and a strike which is launched in protest at their increasingly poor conditions. The strike occurs not long after the arrival of Etienne Lantier, an idealistic, hard-working but temperamental young man. He finds lodgings with the Maheus, a local family who have been working down the mine for generations. The novel charts the progress of the strike and the travails of Etienne, the Maheus and other characters. The story is skilfully told and the characters jump off the page. As a reader I cared deeply for them and was invested in what happened to them.
However, the real genius of the Germinal is Zola’s ability to essentially write an exposé of life in the mines in 1860s France in the form of a novel. He painstakingly describes the physical toll that mining takes on the miners — the grandfather of the Maheu family, Bonnemort, has two bad legs and is constantly coughing up black spittle from his years down the mines. The Maheu children are shown to be underdeveloped due to malnourishment but also from working underground ten hours a day. The physical ailments of characters are depicted again and again.
Equally powerfully, Zola spends a great deal of time laying out what working in the mines was actually like. The detail he provides is extensive — using Etienne’s first shift in the mine as a way in — he chronicles the terrifying descent underground, the sense of darkness, confinement and the changes in temperature from intense heat to intense cold. He describes the water pouring over the miners as well as their bent and unnatural body positions. Zola also details the lives lived underground by the workhorses, with some of the most distressing scenes in the book involving them in harrowing situations.
This is a brilliant novel which portrays the possibilities of collective action without ever losing sight of the fickleness of crowds. It shows how poverty and wealth pass from generation to generation and the effects on those born into it. Moreover, as previously discussed, it meticulously lays out the lives of French miners in the latter half of the 19th century. It does all of this while telling a powerful and occasionally heartbreaking story.
Review by Peadar in Libraries IT.