I don’t think anything can prepare you for the train wreck of a book that is The Beast Within, and I mean that in a good way. Zola is a type of writer that will get you hooked for more of his stuff, because nothing else comes close. Most things that come after will pale in comparison. The Beast Within is one of his most violent works, but it is also a well-balanced work: sensitive in the plight of its characters, prose rich in its poetry and profound meditations of France’s Second Republic quickly descending into a storm. And the trains, oh the fucking trains. Name me another novel where a reader can be so emotionally invested on an inanimate object.
The plot chugs along
But let’s not kid ourselves here — The best parts of The Beast Within is in its exploration of the murderous mind. After a domestic conversation between the Roubards go sour, as the husband discovers that the wife had been cheating on him with their benefactor, a violent tussle ensues. Roubard severely beat up his wife, Séverine and convinced her to scheme to kill the president of the railway, Grandmorin, a promiscuous old man who was keen to marry off Séverine in the first place while still enjoying her on tap.
The crime went ahead, in the first class carriage of the express between Paris to Le Havre. There was a bystander who saw the incident by chance, though for him, the details were pretty hazy the crime was committed at night and the train moved rapidly. The witness was Jacques Lantier, who was in a trance on his own, battling his own murderous demons. On the following day, when news caught on that the president was found on the railway track in the middle of nowhere, Jacques impulsively admitted that he saw the murder first-hand.
This put Roubard and Séverine at risk — the only way out was to befriend Jacques. He will perhaps enjoy the female companionship of Séverine and warm up to the Roubard couple. If this is the case, then he’s shooting himself in the foot because Jacques and Séverine got on pretty well, too well in fact. They got on so well that eventually they plotted for the demise of Roubaud. All this is happening while the investigation of the Grandmorin murder goes on under the misguided but meticulous eye of Msr Denizet, pushed not by the search for objective truth but rather, instructions from his superiors which reek of dirty political maneouvres.
Our innate desire to murder
The body count of The Beast Within is right up there. Although Jacques Lantier’s sickness for the hunger to murder is front and centre, we should not undermine the other murders in the book — committed or merely schemed upon. It seems that every character has a reason to murder the next person. Most of the murders that happen in the book are crimes of passion. Roubard murders Grandmorin after having found out that he was cuckolded by a man older and more influential than he; Flore was jealous of Jacques’ relationship with Séverine; Pecqueux fought Jacques to the death because Jacques had been sleeping with his mistress. The only murder that’s premeditated and deliberate was the poisoning of Aunt Phasie by her husband for her buried money.
It is a novel full of vitriol, but more exploratory than explanatory. Zola impels us to look deep within and ask ourselves whether or not sometimes we breed these murderous germs, that every single one of us is capable of murder. As a humanist, Zola believes in traits that have been passed on to us from generations back. Jacques’ desire to kill women is not so much his fault’s than a caveman ancestor who had been wronged by a female and had never been avenged. This is all speculation of course. But Jacques’ psychosis has a visual trigger — revelation of the body sparks his desire to kill, to grab a knife and cut a woman open. It is sexual in nature, without the need to engage in sex itself.
Jacques’ desire then is to possess the human being that he intents to kill. He is certainly not impotent, as he can engage in sex. Yet, Jacques is conflicted in his action. He had never committed murder before, and perhaps after Séverine’s admission that she and Roubard murdered Grandmorin and astoundingly got away with it, Jacques desire to murder is triggered again. He had perhaps had happily entertained the impossibility of getting away with murder until his mistress proved him otherwise. It started small, as he follows a young woman into a train and stalks her, but never really finding the opportunity and courage to commit the act.
But it got a little too much when Séverine provoked him, thinking that she’d do them both a favour of having a quickie before committing the act of murder. It sounds pretty fucked up as it is, and you can argue that Séverine’s demise is pretty well-deserved. She was after all, the instigator of the scheme to replace her husband.
Murder the main course, but don’t sleep on the side dishes
The Beast Within was written in a tumultuous France of the Second Republic. The arrival of trains and the reconciliation of the rail networks some decades earlier have opened up France to unprecedented of movement of goods and people. Séverine wouldn’t have been able to see a specialist on a weekly basis if it wasn’t for the route between Paris to Le Havre. France was progressing, for the good or the bad.
Trains are notorious in literature. They signify the writer’s concern of a world changing too fast. Anna Karenina killed herself under the train. For Tolstoy, the coming of the new technology is murder. The Indonesian bard, Pramoedya, observed in his Buru Quarter that the world was being reduced by wires. At the epoch, he was referring to the arrival of trains, but if we take that statement in the lens of the current century, then the world is being reduced by the wires of the world wide web. The statement still holds through. We’re still in the dark whether this technological progress will make us or break us in the end. We are standing in the same platform as Zola, Tolstoy and Pramoedya, and none of us had really any idea where we’re going. All we know is that we have a fancy one way ticket someplace.
Zola also explored the relationship between man and machine in The Beast Within. Ironically, the character which we empathise with the most is a fucking train. A FUCKING TRAIN. Zola really poured his best writing into La Lison, which is really nothing more than an outdated locomotive. However, La Lison is more intimate to Jacques than he is to any other human being, including his mistress.
He had driven many other locomotives. Some were easy to handle and some were awkward, some worked hard and some were useless. He had come to realize that they all had their own individual characters and that many of them, as might be said of man women, left much to be desired. The fact that he loved La Lison was a sure that sign that it possessed all the best qualities he could ever hope to find in a woman.
La Lison’s battle amidst the snow and haze of December to get to Paris was haunting. And it was achingly beautiful to read. You’d never know if the locomotive would pull through against the treachery of winter. Technology perhaps, is still no match against the whims of nature — something that remains true today.
Look no further, Zola is the beast here
I don’t know why I’ve avoided Zola for so long. I thought that from the distance that he was one of those unreadable and unnecessarily complex writer, like Henry James, but I find him to be the exact opposite. Zola is succinct, but his writing is profound. The Beast Within is an absolute masterpiece — it is a novel full of sinister shadows, phantoms of our own thoughts that may have been sparked for a second, and then repressed again — just as Jacques repressed his goblins for such a long time. It is a novel full of haunting set pieces and unforgiving though stunning sceneries. And the tumultuousness of the characters who will frustrate you, agitate you, but weirdly enough endear you — despite their despicable flaws.
The book ends with the death of Jacques at the hand of his fireman, Pecqueux. The train is moving fast, faster than it needed to be, the soldiers singing in the back as they headed to an unknown war to commit murders of their own. The bodies of the two were absolute smashed into pieces under the train, but Zola does not disclose what happens to the train. We can only assume. It is a foreboding of things to come in the Second Republic, but who’s not to say that we’re on the same train? As we indulge in our hedonistic stupor, nobody is really asking, “Who’s driving the bloody train? Why are we going so quick?”
