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Do we need more historical fiction? More history? Haven’t we got enough? These, and other ridiculous questions, hint at what historical fiction is for. And what it is not for. Does Myers set out to Dick-Turpin-ise King David Hartley, chief of The Cragg Vale Coiners, who runs, briefly and badly, a successful coining business and [ ]
Realism One of the great novelists of European critical-realist fiction – Émile Zola – really takes it up a gear when he sits down to write about stuff that never happened, first putting pen to paper in 1871. This really is the great project of our time: telling it like it is – as opposed [ ]
Reading fiction at all can seem, to some people, an odd thing to do. For it is, if you think about it, an odd thing to do. But then, some people watch tv, some people listen to podcasts, even about things that are not real. And we all look at our phones: isn’t reading a [ ]
On reading the whole of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Novel Series (1871-1893) – fifteen of them this year – it has become apparent that some are nowhere near as good as others. Leaving aside his other works of fiction – including the excellent but non-RM ‘Thérèse Raquin’, this is my top 20: 1 – Nana (1880) 2 [ ]
This is the twentieth and final novel of his Rougon-Macquart series – all showing how heredity and environment can be used to explain how members of one family come to a sticky end over the course of the Second Empire: 1851-1870. However, what it became instead is a defining critique of the newly realised bourgeois [ ]
Angélique – the protagonist for this novel – is a fairy tale type character with all the depth of a children’s fairy story – but this doesn’t lend itself to Zola’s naturalistic and scientific approach: how doe you write a late nineteenth century realistic novel about a character living out the life of a medieval [ ]
In this the fifth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola focuses on the church and the clash of celibacy and sexuality, how unnatural it is: how the church perverts sexuality and what it means to be a physical human being. However, Zola nonetheless has a thoroughly catholic view of sexuality and virginity, or purity and [ ]
With the Rougons back once more in their ancestral home of rural Provence, they can truly be their bourgeois best: small minded, underhand, selfish, corrupt and fatally flawed. Though there are more infamous bourgeois beasts in Zola – such as Octave Mouret in the he tenth novel ‘Pot-Bouille’ or ‘Pot Luck’ and the eleventh novel [ ]
These ‘searing, evocative stories’ are said to be ‘as graceful and subtle as Chekhov’. They are certainly unusual and full of sentences that will give the reader pause. I guess this is what passes as thought-provoking – something which fiction that you read for plot doesn’t make you do – that is think. What ‘good [ ]
A pretty damning review: “For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.” But when we consider novels in terms of what’s missing, we are necessarily spoilt for choice. Because when a novelist writes a novel they are [ ]