ROME

Author:  Émile Zola

Year: 1959 (1896)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translators Hanna Szumanska-Grossowa & Irena Wieczorkiewicz)

A few months ago, I posted a review of Émile Zola’s novel “Lourdes” which was the first book of the “Three Cities”-trilogy. In it, Zola introduces us to Pierre Froment, a Roman Catholic priest who hopes to regain his dwindling faith by a miracle of the sacred well of Saint Bernadette. In the second book “Rzym” (“Rome”), we meet Father Pierre again a few years after his return from Lourdes. His faith in God has hardly evolved but he has found a way to justify his activity within Christianity through social work. By the time we re-connect with him, his commitment to the poor has consumed him completely, and with the support of a radical and highly criticised French cardinal, he embarks on a mission to reform all of Catholicism and shift its focus from struggling for worldly power to aiding the disadvantaged.

The vantage point for his activism is his book “New Rome” which is rewarded with instant success among the broad masses of Paris and makes him something of a local celebrity in the French capital. In the meantime, it also attracts the rather less favourable attention of the Holy See. When he learns that the Vatican is about to ban his work by adding it to the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Pierre travels to Rome, hoping to be received by the Holy Father himself to defend his writing directly before him.

In Rome, Pierre’s naiveté and ideology clash with the crushing forces of history, nationalism, vanity, and the struggle for power within the Catholic Church itself. We follow him as he scurries from one meeting to another between cardinals, monsignors, noblemen, and generals, in a confusing web of ambitious power players who say one thing and do another, or often nothing at all.

With “Rzym”, Zola continues the assault on the Catholic Church which he launched in the first instalment of the trilogy. It is vile, potent, and consistent but also inevitably outdated. The issues he raises have long since been lost to history. To a secular audience more than 120 years after the book first appeared, much of his criticism seems irrelevant. In his time and place, in Catholic France which Zola repeatedly calls “the eldest daughter of the Church”, it constituted a significant and bold statement which was widely read and fiercely debated. The book came at a time shortly after the Italian unification and its annexation of the Vatican into the new kingdom. The Church State, which had once been a superpower in Europe, found itself grappling with the reality of having no formal political power on Earth. Pierre Froment is caught up in the war between the white royalists and the black clergy. In Zola’s time, this was the era of the new and forward-looking secular state’s triumph over the old and reactionary backward empire of theocracy.

Much like “Lourdes”, “Rzym” is told at a slow pace with the narrative heavily encumbered by lengthy and detailed descriptions of buildings, people, vehicles, and attire, as should be expected from a celebrated realist such as Zola. Father Pierre appears to get very little done throughout the whole novel and as he leaves yet another fruitless meeting with yet another high-ranking church official sporting yet another proud nose and aristocratic chin, one begins to wonder what the purpose of this book really is. In an apparent attempt to spice things up a bit, Zola throws in a rather cheesy love story into the mix which does little to accelerate the course of events or explain the underlying anguish of Pierre’s vain undertaking. The main story keeps grinding down the reader the same way it relentlessly grinds down Father Pierre. The circular movement toward the inevitable becomes more and more pronounced.

I am particularly fascinated by Zola’s choice to make most of the named characters, Cardinal Boccanera being the splendid exception, with whom Father Pierre interacts implicitly promise him their support and help in defending his book, giving him hope that he may still win the battle against the Index, only to deflect and evade all calls for action. Pierre, however, maintains his optimism until the very end.

Admittedly, there is a lot to unpack in this novel that will by nature fly over the 21^st century reader’s head. Watching the complete demise of the once so powerful Papal state to an existence at the mercy of a young monarchy (the geopolitical independence of the Holy See was not restored until some 30 years later) must have been a quashing experience. Also, I suspect that the memories of the Risorgimento that led to the Italian unification, bear limited gravitas in current Italian politics whereas 120 years ago they were still the foundation of the new state’s budding raison d’etre.

My lasting impression of Émile Zola’s writing, however, is that I cannot quite be impressed by it. Granted, the “Three Cities” is not considered to be the best representation of his genius, but “Rzym” unveiled some unexpected weaknesses of this literary giant’s. Particularly the somewhat failed love story made me reflect on the way a skilful writer builds drama and releases the climax. In this case, it was almost as if the main story was written first and the love story was glued onto it at a later point without being fully integrated. A bit like the “Welcome to the House of Fun” chorus in the Madness song from the 1980s. For comparison, I find the pathos and emotional potency in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s writing to be vastly superior.

Similarly, Zola’s realistic environmental accounts also tend to be just a tad bit to tedious to quite hit the mark. It is by all means fascinating to imagine what Rome must have looked like, sounded like, and smelled like in the end of the 19^th century but it does after a while become repetitive. Voltaire’s words “the secret of being a bore is to tell everything” come to mind. Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” is an example of realism that I find crisper and more vigorous.

Check back for my review of the third and final part of the trilogy, "Paris", shortly.