Germinal

As I noted in my previous post, at the weekend I finished the 49th book of this year, "Germinal" by Zola, which is a book from the list. After some consideration, I have decided that it is not the book of the year, but it is very good.

Like "The Grapes of Wrath", I found that it depressed and angered me in equal measure. Angered because of the manifest injustice depicted in the novel (although, it should be noted, it was decidedly, and deliberately, one-sided). Depressed because the novel, despite being more than a hundred years old, could very easily have been written about Thatcher's Britain... and removed from the context of a miners' strike specifically it could have been written about in-work poverty today.

(It also didn't help that it was clear, pretty much from the outset, that those who thought of themselves as the saviours of the strikers were manifestly not suited to the job, whether due to self-interest or simple naivety. Indeed, the person with the clearest vision of how genuine change might come about turned out to be an utter, utter bastard... which, yes, is about right.)

Even the supposedly upbeat ending is pretty depressing - the protagonist walks away hopeful that change is coming, and change did indeed come. Unfortunately, the name for that change was "the Russian Revolution", which didn't go so well.

So, can I recommend it? Well, um... maybe. If you're in the mood for a French novel about a doomed miners' strike, and all the poverty and despair that goes with it, I guess so. But if you like happy books, not so much.