Finally, I found where to begin with Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence. Some of the novels I have already read and reviewed here belong to the cycle (The Belly of Paris, The Debacle, Germinal) but I wanted to start at the undisputed beginning. That is here, with The Fortunes of the Rougons (1871).
The book is set in December 1851, when a coup d'etat in Paris installed Napoleon III and the Second Empire. The key events were in Paris but there were also popular uprisings all over the country, including Provence. Zola was partly raised in Aix-en-Provence which here he renames Plassans.
Zola made a key decision - to confine the action to Plassans and its immediate neighbourhood. Action elsewhere is brought in by letter and, to a much lesser extent, newspapers. There is a key period in the month when nobody in Plassans knows what is happening elsewhere. Pierre Rougon, a middleaged bourgois, has a son in Paris who keeps him as up-to-date as he can. Backed by his ambitious wife Felicite, Pierre seizes control of the town and acts as mayor - the actual mayor having been taken prisoner by the local insurgents.
The complicating factor, the stroke of authorial brilliance, is that Rougon's implacable enemy is his half-brother Antoine Macquart, who sets himself up as a rebel purely to oppose Pierre. There was also a half-sister, Ursule, who married and moved away. One of her sons has married one of Pierre's daughters, the other, seventeen year-old Silvere, is living in Plassans with his grandmother, the half-mad eccentric 'Aunt Dide'.
Silvere begins and ends the novel. It begins with him and his thirteen year-old sweetheart waiting to join the army of insurgents heading their way. The rebels pass through Plassans at dead of night, simply capturing a trio of big wigs they happen upon and moving on. Around the midpoint of the book there is a battle in which the rebels are defeated. Miette is killed, Silvere captured. It ends with him being returned to Plassans where a gendarme he accidentally injured executes him.
Zola's second key decision is the way in which he includes the necessary back story. There is a lot of it and it has to go in because, as he tells us in the preface, Zola's purpose is to prove that "Heredity, like gravity, has its laws." Yet it must not be allowed to outweigh or unbalance the narrative. So in Chapter One he deals with the rebels passing through Plassans and leaving with Silvere and Miette. Chapter Two describes Plassans waking the next day, speculating on what happened. Thus we meet people who live there and the relationships between some of them. We meet the Rougons. Pierre is embarrassed by his mother and half-siblings. We then go back fifty years to when Dide was widowed and took up with the poacher Macquart, who sired Antoine and Ursule.
And so on... The book hops backward and forwards in time in substantial chunks. This means we always know when and where we are and are always uncovering more insights into the main characters. By the end of the book this is what we are expecting, so Zola cleverly does something different. The first clues to Silvere's death are delivered in what seems like a waking dream of Aunt Dide. Even she does not know if it is real or not. Antoine and Pierre both assume she is talking about the long-gone poacher Macquart and his lifelong war with the gendarmerie. But no, Dide actually witnessed the death of her grandson while out buying brandy for Antoine - and wow, does that hit home.
I've been spending a lot of time recently considering the French Naturalists and Realists, notably the trio of Zola, Maupassant and Huysmans. The fact is, I enjoy them all. The Fortunes of the Rougons I particularly enjoyed.
Next question: do I continue in publication order or in the order recommended by whoever wrote the Wikipedia essay?
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