"The Beast Within" by Emile Zola

This book was one of my favourite books when I was a teen purely because I thought it was a raucous and raging event of pure irony. It really made me fall in love with Emile Zola’s works, even more than “Therese Raquin” and that’s saying something. It’s a deliciously dark book that you cannot help but love. It’s psychological, at moments it can be terrifying and in some parts it can even make you emotional. I think that this is possibly Zola’s greatest effort at the novel and has a brilliant sense of futurism to it that many fail to recognise. It is Zola’s magnum opus and I’ve read it quite a few times since. It’s a brilliant novel in which you learn a new thing about the psychological aspect every time you revisit it.

All about the will of the human monster, it can even rival “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley in its introspection and the character controls his mania with another key character. This is what stops him from a murderous rampage that he seems to talk about exclusively. Affairs and trains take over the novel in symbols and themes as we see murder and robbery take over the human mind. Investigations are launched, there are prime suspects we don’t expect and on the way, we never really see what is right there in front of us - motive for the arrest and motive for the crime. Murders remain unsolved, affairs widen the gap between characters and money is stolen from right under the noses of certain characters. Whilst Grandmorin gets his way and Roubaud begins to deteriorate mentally, we see the characters who are basically hindering the progress of other characters - criminals vs. the changing world. Property dealings, money laundering - all on the scale of a dark Dostoevsky novel. Lantier deteriorates and Severine awakens to great realisation. Whilst Roubaud seeks to get himself out of this alive, manic depression, manic salvation and manic insanity seek to destroy friendships, relationships and get those secrets out in the open. But may the trains always go on.

The themes of this novel are typical of a Zola, but written in an atypical style. The themes can be thought of as the following: love, death, violence, madness, retribution, psychology, terror, robbery and crime, motives and innocence, imprisonment and money. Murder seems to be at the centre of the way in which we read the novel, it makes absolutely no sense to think of it any other way. When I read it for the first time, I thought that I wanted to look at it from a violent, flagrant and murderous point of view and it reads like its a tale of a set of people who are just becoming a part of the human condition of not getting what they want in times of great desperation. The money and property involved are at the centre and often, these are at the centre of novels about people wanting to kill each other, committing affairs and crimes etc. But, when we look at the atypical things about a Zola novel, we see that the psychological torture is there but then there seems to be an element of the want to be good throughout it. There are people that want to get ‘better’ whereas, in other Zola novels, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Severine seems to want a calm and peaceful life, but then she goes back on herself until Lantier is injured. Only then does she come back to the calm.

The symbol of trains is so strong in this novel that its almost unreal. The train journeys are as is in other Zola novels and I think that it really makes a difference to the way you see the novel. For example: this is the way in which we tell that the psychological problems are more modern than others. The trains going by shows us the sheer depth of the situation and the way in which it is ingrained into the very heart of the changing times. We suddenly have property law and monetary inheritance. It is a mad book with dangerous attitudes towards war but it is typical Zola in every sense of the word. It is brilliant in every way.

I think more people should read this novel because there are so many things to discover through the madness of the characters and so many things to rediscover upon you’re next read on the laws, morals etc. that govern their lives. I would recommend this to everyone who loves gothic novels, irony, modernity, dystopias and romanticism. It is a beautiful novel that I wish to read again someday for its pure darkness. It is amazingly dark.