Greg's Reviews > La Bête Humaine

Without question, the most accessible of the fifteen of twenty Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels I have yet read. It could be described as a psychological murder mystery but, as the translator makes clear, the story is a “whydunnit,” not a “whodunnit.” This time the setting is the French railway, which during the Second Empire, as in other industrially advanced countries, was making travel easier. Jacques Lantier is a train conductor with an overwhelming compulsion, who had “always wanted to kill someone since he was a child, and he’d been tortured to screaming-point by the horror of this obsession”. We readers know it’s just a matter of “when,” not “if.” He’s prevented from realizing his urge in almost comic ways, bad timing, scruples, being witness to another murder, and—strangest of all—falling in love.

We all have inner compulsions to a greater or lesser degree. What happens when they become irresistible or create a sense of inevitability? If they are kept at bay, is the respite only temporary? And when it comes back, is it the same, stronger, or weaker? And how do temptations of doing what we know is wrong satisfy? Or just push reckoning sometime into the future?

Perhaps my favorite relationship in this story is one between Lantier and his locomotive, La Lison. “The mystery of manufacture had given her a soul, that something that the chance blows of a hammer can bring to metal, that an assembly worker’s hand can lend to the individual parts: the engine’s personality, its life.” La Lison is just one of the many colorful characters who fill the nooks of two sequential but related plot lines. The ending must have had quite an effect on its readership when it was first serialized and later published. It’s symbolically tragic.

For those considering dabbling in Zola and have never done so before, this would be a good place to start.