Germinal (Emile Zola)

Germinal is often cited as one of Zola's masterpieces. 13th in the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, Germinal follows the thread of Zola's avowedly naturalist approach to themes of heredity and environment within a study of one family (two branches - one enjoying wealth and other poverty),

Germinal is a book that will stay with you forever. It is a seminal study of working class experience and struggle, and of a miners' strike in particular, forged in the mould of Zola's republicanism (in the sense of sharing the 179 ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity), positivism and realism.

Neither a political tract, nor a mirror on contemporary society, Germinal lacks the larger-than-life characters of a Pip or a Hamlet or an Emma. What it does, and successfully so, is to unwrap the quotidian realities - with sheer wealth of description - of a moment in time and experience, in a manner that rendered it enduring and significant some 100 years later when Britain's own miners were forced to strike.

Though Zola is said not to have embraced socialism until later in life and leftist - particularly Marxist - critiques of him supposedly abound, Germinal flirts with socialism and even anarchism in a fairly knowing and empathetic way. It's also a deeply, almost frighteningly, human book - by which I mean that you become so entangled in the lives and experiences and joys and horrors of the striking miners, so engrossed in feelings of outrage on their behalf, that are they rarely less than real to you.

Germinal, then, left me angry, frustrated and sad. I can only assume that Zola was being ironic in choosing the month of Germinal (March-April in the 1792 revolutionary calendar) - the month of hope and germination normally associated with springtime - as the title for this book. Then again, hopefulness is perhaps the fundamental sentiment driving the working-class struggle - hope that is continually thwarted by the reality of greedy, grasping natures but that nevertheless springs eternal.

Without doubt, Germinal ought to be part of the national reading curriculum. Not merely for the fact that it might inspire a generation of right-thinking individuals, but because it lights the torch of outrage against social injustice and is quite honestly a beautifully written book with wonderfully observed descriptions of life in all its quotidian mess.

What the Grapes of Wrath began - if, like me, you read that first - Germinal takes to another level altogether.