Maupassant, Bel Ami

Guy de Maupassant
Bel Ami
1885

I re-read this after hearing a pretty ropey adaptation on Radio 4 at the weekend. Maupassant's tale of the rise-and-rise of a Parisian journalist who gossips his way into high society is a rare book, if only for the fact that the villain wins out in the end.

However, perhaps the fact that the central villain George Duroy rises through a society of villains contains a deeper message on the corrupt nature of power.
Maupassant's reluctance to knock down his womanising, conniving journalist in the end perhaps stems from his own tortured life. The blurb at the back of my Penguin Classics edition states that at the time of writing Maupassant was "already under a sentence of death from syphilis". Perhaps he found a life of social and sexual debauchery that does not come with any consequences - and indeed positively leads to advancement - very appealing.

There is also a contemporary lesson in Duroy's means of financial advancement, when he cottons on to his editor's plan to manipulate the financial markets by whipping up the fervour for a war in Morocco.

Look how well some companies did when a gang of unscrupulous oil barons connived their way into power and, with the help of some acquiescent media editors, whipped up the fervour for war in another Islamic country recently.

Zola, Germinal

Emile Zola
Germinal
1885

Fantastic docu-drama on life in a 19th Century French coal mine. Drawn from Zola's own research in the mines, as well as his own fertile imagination, the book draws to a tragic conclusion of classical Greek proportions (with a few nods to Greek mythology along the way).