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6.5/10

I was beginning to fear that this one would never end. No matter how much I read, there were always at least 100 pages left to go. I felt certain I'd read the equivalent of two thousand pages when I looked up to see "100 more to go". Was Penelope at work, on her magic shroud? While I slept, she added 100 pages each night. This is surely the most boring book in the Rougon-Macquart series yet. (This is my 4th.)

Multiple stray thoughts occurred to me as I was sighing and bemoaning my way through this one: I would have enjoyed this as a teenager, just "eating up" every word of Zola's religious and political caricatures; I would have enjoyed this as a young uni student as we dissected and parsed every precious Zolaian (is that a word? if not it should be) thought. Now: not so much. Now, it just annoyed me because the more I read, the more absurd it became. I even read it in French for a while, thinking that the translator had dropped the ball on this one, as often happens with Zola. Nope. The translator was bang-on, in sentiment, in cultural reference, in boring old prose.

"Mon Dieu. Mon Dieu. Would that Abbé Faujas and precious Marthe Mouret be swallowed whole by the religious fire that burns them," I thought. Oh, such prophecies, in the old and wise! I could have written this in my sleep and made it a barn-burning mini-series for television.

Plodding. Lumbering. Dragging. Floundering. Hummmmdrrum. I still hear the low base rumbling in my skull. This book has driven me to the edge of distraction.

These characters were too far-fetched even for me, and I say that having lived in the shadow (and grip) of small-town (catholic) Ontario where the priests and nuns ruled the communities with iron fists; where the manipulations and maneuverings could have been the prototypes for Zola's people, had they lived in his time. But even they, in their machinations, could never have gone this far.

Zola's main characters don't work here, because the caricatures are flawed; they are consistently evil and nasty specimens, without once achieving a breath of kind humanity. Human nature is not like that, and I am surprised that Zola should paint them this way. Even 'umble Uriah has his moments of tenderness -- where he reveals the soft underbelly of his humanity. Here, Abbé Faujas is persistently evil, from the moment he walks into the town with his gnarly crone of a mother in tow, to the moment he expires on the mythical pyre. (One can almost hear Satan cackling, and crackling away, over Faujas's demise.)

Marthe Mouret is the epitome of religious ecstasy gone badder-than-bad: a portrait incarnate of unrelenting religious fervour and obeisance-to-the-Black-Cloth in misplaced adoration: in loving the man, she thinks she is loving God. Such women were indeed created by the Catholic Church, but never such a woman as Mme Mouret.

François Mouret plays the fool from beginning to end, a relentless hard-headed, narcissistic moron who is saved from himself by his own wilful madness.

The dozens of other evil characters that populate the novel are no more than stick figures of evilness, which once again surprised me in Zola. I'd expected more depth and perspicuity from him. (Perhaps by this point in the series he was getting tired of his own mission, of painting the baseness of human nature and so let loose like a cannon shot, without much accuracy.)

As I slept on this, and reflected more, my estimation fell even more, and so slipped to a mere 6.5/10 stars because of the total implausibility of this scenario. I've never had difficulty in suspending my disbelief in literature, for the sake of a good story, but this one, for some reason stretches the very bounds of cockeyed credulity. This one was so over the top, that even Le ventre de Paris was less gormandizing.