For my 60th birthday recently I was given the full 20 volume set of Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. I'd already read one without realizing it was part of a series, and one towards the end too.  
They're very good, but there are no likeable characters at all in them, everyone is a complete b*****d to a greater or lesser degree. 
They're set in the French Second Empire of the 1850s to early 1870s and reflect Zola's extreme dislike of Napoleon III's regime, he only began writing them after Napoleon's fall. 
The one I read first was Nana, it is superb even though you feel you need a shower after each chapter such is the behaviour of the characters, every one of them.

The only one of Zola's Rougon -Macquart novels I've read is The Debacle, set in 1870-71 during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune.



Reading the introduction, Zola personally walked the route the French Army had taken to Sedan. When he wrote the book in 1892, he had to get his facts right as many of the events were fresh in the minds of the participants and some of the historical characters mentioned were still alive.

I doubt if I could handle a 20 book series. Game of Thrones was enough.

Thank you MarkUK and Trike for drawing my attention to Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels - I feel I should give them a try. I might even give them a go in French although that might prove rather hard going. However having had a quick glance at an online French version of the first book, La Fortune des Rougon, it doesn't look too difficult if armed with a dictionary. Not sure though whether I could handle all twenty books in French; it took me months to read Camus' L'étranger and that's quite a slim book. I much prefer my native English if reading for pleasure, although I can't deny it would be good pour améliorer mon français.

I read a number of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels when I was much younger but I don't think I ever read the first one.  I thought that Pauline in La Joie de Vivre was a sympathetic character but too self-sacrificing. Clothilde in Le Docteur Pascal I didn't like much.  Some critics think she was based on an idealised version of Zola's mistress. There was one plot point I found distasteful but I won't mention it lest I 'spoil' anything for anyone who might want to read the novel.  MarkUK, I thought the books were good but I'd have to read something more uplifting for my next 'good read' because they didn't exactly fill me with a feeling of hope.

A few years ago BBC Radio 4 did a dramatisation of the whole series under the the title Blood Sex and Money with Glenda Jackson playing Dide, the matriarch of the family.  I listened to a few episodes but not all. I've recently had an email from BBC saying to sign in to my iplayer account if I want to carry on using it.  If I do so I'll have to see if the series is still on the iplayer.

That radio play serial was re-broadcast last autumn. An epic undertaking of all 20 novels and an excellent production. I've often thought that the Rougon-Macquart series would make a superb television drama or La Débâcle on its own a cracking feature film. A sort of French Gone with the Wind but so much more than that.

What I found shocking (in a looser sense, after all it is the 21st century) was the F word appearing in Nana, I didn't expect to see that in a novel published in 1880.

I've a vague memory of having seen a BBC TV adaptation of Germinal back in the early 70s.

Meles, you should certainly give The Debacle a try. First came across the story as a youngster with the Classics Illustrated version Not until I got the Penguin version did I discover it was part of a series. It works perfectly fine as a stand alone novel.

Actually, although The Boke of St Albans is frequently cited, it stops at "A musket (male spug hawk, it seems) for a Holy Water Clerk". The "kestrel for a knave" was added to the original in the Harley MS 2340 (f. 50r) as ‘A kesterell for a knafe’
see https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/10/a-kestrel-for-a-knave.html for further data.

I read "L'Etranger" at university and I feel I read it in French. Yes, it must have been because I have always remember the beginning "Au'jourdhui Maman a morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais quoi." I don't think I can remember the start of any other book, but our lecturer must have stressed this beginning as introducing the theme of the book.

Triceratops wrote:

Extract from the book review by the N Y Times (May 1972):

The action jumps off the mark on the very first page and carries the reader skimming like hurdler over the clichés. The pace is so swift, the drama so heightened by alternating flashes of tragedy and comedy that one has to stop frequently just to catch breath and to marvel at the majesty and absurdity of the bloody fighting over so‐called sacred soil.

I read O Jerusalem! about 30 years ago (so I’m paraphrasing this from memory). There is a particularly comical episode in it when the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) arrives in the city in June 1947. On arrival at the airport the committee members are bundled into British army vehicles to be escorted to their accommodation. They are unhappy to be so closely associated with the occupying power and are keen to see as much of the city and the rest of Palestine as possible for themselves during their time-limited trip. The British officer in charge, however, tells them that their visit is not welcomed by the Arab Higher Committee as they are seen by them as not impartial but rather pro-Zionist by inclination. Furthermore, the UNSCOP members are told that for their own safety they should keep their heads down during the drive. One of the leaders of UNSCOP, the Swedish lawyer Emil Sandström later recalled that when he first arrived in the city, all he got to see of Jerusalem, therefore, as he crouched down in the vehicle, was the imperious arse in khaki shorts of the Royal Military policeman standing in front of him.

That's exactly it Vizzer.  

When the UN delegation reached Jerusalem, they hoisted the UN flag, which being blue and white, attracted rifle fire from every Arab who saw. The Arabs having mistaken it for the blue and white Israeli flag.

Another little anecdote concerns the Czech armaments work, Zbrojovka Brno, who met and agreed to supply weapons to an Arab delegate At their next meeting, they met and agreed to supply weapons to an Israeli delegate.

There are quite a few dark episodes in the book as well.

I found some extracts (one is linked here - if the blurb is correct Etienne's back history must have been changed because he wasn't Belgian in the book) from a 1993 film adaptation of Zola's Germinal. 

I know this is no way to judge a book, but lined up on the shelf Germinal looks the most challenging - it's the longest, over 500 pages.

I have just finished Guinea Pig Club by Emily Mayhew. It is a non-fiction account of people badly burnt in air fighting in the second world war and how they were brought back to England and given not just treatment but made to feel part of the community of East Grinstead at the bottom of England. I knew the story because the leader/boss of the burns unit was a New Zealander Archibald McIndoe (I always thought he did it in conjunction with Harold Gillies, a fellow NZer , but his role seems to have been a lesser one. I found the first 2/3s of it hard-going because it was all about how they were injured and what sort of bad burns they had suffered to their faces. (It makes Nevil Shute's accounts seem mild in the extreme.)
But then they returned to be treated and rehabilitated with their faces reconstructed in England - McIndoe had to fight for his methods, but he seems to have been a very strong determined man. The community of East Grinstead comes out of the story very well as they accepted very damaged men, both physically difficult to look at and mentally. But the community, especially young women, were encouraged to get to know them, dance with them, and some of them even married them.
I have always found it a very touching story, but I am not sure I would have coped: I do find physical distortions hard to cope with. Do you ignore them? Ask what happened?
The Guinea Pig club met regularly afterwards and put out pamphlets and booklets. I suppose the youngest would be about 95. I see now they had their last reunion in 2007.

Have you read Richard Hillary's "The Last Enemy"? He was one of the patients in that unit.

It was of course called the Guinea Pig Club because the techniques being developed by McIndoe were, at least in the very earliest days, almost entirely experimental, so each victim was like a laboratory guinea pig whose treatment, whether successful or otherwise, would aid those that came after. The Royal Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead rapidly became the pre-eminent centre for the treatment of burns and for surgical reconstruction. I believe many of the survivors of the bombing of the two landing craft (RFA Sir Galahad and RFA Sir Tristram) during the 1982 Falklands War, passed through there, although by then similar specialist burns units had been established throughout the country. The hospital is still very much in existence and its burns and reconstruction units are still leaders in the field.

When I was working in the neighbouring town of Crawley during the 1980s, I had a friend in East Grinstead and we'd often meet up in the local pubs/cafes/shops there. It may be a selective memory but I recall that East Grinstead seemed to have more than a usual number of disfigured people, often men of retirement age. I don't know but perhaps many of those successfully treated there in the 1940s and onwards, met locals and then married or otherwise settled down in the town. However I can also remember in the 1980s elbowing my way to the front of the bar in a crowded East Grinstead pub and there talking to a guy of about my own age (military perhaps, but I was wary of asking too much) who's hands were damaged by scarring. He was apparently being treated at the hospital and they were encouraged to go out and socialise in the local community ... not that he seemed to particularly need any encouragement.

The affinity of East Grinstead for their Guinea Pigs was only strengthened in July 1943 when a lone German bomber, having mistaken the route to London, dropped its bombs on the town, which was then, other than it's hospital, just a small rural market town. The town centre was destroyed but the most devastating bombs were those that fell on the Whitehall Cinema. It was a Friday afternoon and the cinema was almost full with about 60 local children and 140 adults, many them off-duty Canadian soldiers. Altogether 108 people died in the bombing, a third of them children, while 235 were injured (the royal Victoria hospital was obviously the closest but was completely overwhelmed by the number of casualties). So badly damaged were some of the bodies from the cinema that many were unidentifiable and had to be buried in a mass grave, and it is unlikely that many families in the town didn't personally know at least one of the victims.

I remember my mother had a copy of "Faces From The Fire" which was a biography of the man who ran the Guineapig Club. There is a murder mystery by Kate Ellis which features as a plot point the masks used after World War I by people with damaged faces.  I'm currently reading something more mundane, namely 'Close Knit Killer' which is a murder mystery set in the American Rocky Mountains with the background of a yarncraft circle
  I'm not that far into it yet - so far, so good, not twee at all.

This will be arriving today;



Part 3 of a naval warfare trilogy, the first being on the Java Sea Campaign, the second on the opening phase of the Guadalcanal Campaign and this one, the conclusion of Guadalcanal.

EDIT: it has arrived

Turns out there's a fourth one. Hardback due out February 2023.

Look for videos from Drachinifel. He has done 8 on the Guadalcanal naval actions. https://www.youtube.com/user/Drachinifel

Thanks, George


EDIT: Watched Savo Island and Eastern Solomons episodes, both interesting vids.

Long ago on a visit to USA and onJUly 4th we found ourselves pulled into in a small, hick place for their local show. At the end of the turns by locals - all very good I ought say, before it closed there was a call for Veterans to stand. And there were many. They  were applauded and then we went home. 

We do not honour our forces thus at home I realised but I was less aware of the Pacific battles at that time and more immersed in the 5years of European conflict so I wondered where all these men had been during the Battle of the Bulge or Anzio perhaps. 

Then I began to read and see film of the Pacific War and understood much more of what it meant to the USA and her Veterans. I shall get the trilogy for He who reads this sort of stuff in our house - and may dip into them myself. But, as with most battle campaigns recent and long past,  I usually find the exposed truths painfully overwhelming

Maybe try just one book first, Priscilla. In case he doesn't like it. 

I liked them, doesn't mean to say everybody else does. 

The Java Sea Campaign is the one I started with. A Campaign that is often overlooked.

I am at the moment reading London by Edward Rutherfurd. His books (all the ones I have read anyway) take a place and start way back in history following a family - you can tell which family they are connected to because they all have some sort of defining feature; this one is a little bit of white hair and webbed fingers. This one begins with a short dissertation on the beginnings of life on earth, and then continues to the Ice Ages, and the beginning of the Thames River, when the place was called Londinos, and was just a posting site for travellers. He mixes real people with fictional, not just the kings and queens of the time, but people like Geoffrey Chaucer are actual characters mingling with the fictional ones of the novel. I am about halfway through and this part is called 1386. He goes through the corruption of the era, the growth of guilds and the growing power of the monarchy.
I have read it a long time ago, and also his Sarum, perhaps Russka. None of his recent ones, though. They are long but readable, so I can get through them more quickly than some shorter books.

Anyone read A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman? I've had it on the shelf for years and might start it next week. From what I gather it's a history with fictional bits for want of a better description, telling the story of the dismal 14th century in Europe.

Yes, read it years ago. Interesting, but somewhat eccentric in its focus on de Coucy. Popular rather than scholarly.

I've finished Drachinifel's Guadalcanal videos and at the end, D mentions this book, while also informing that the author has since died. I've actually read it, though I prefer JRC's books;



Also finished this today:

A great story The Invisible Man. I'm sure we'd all like to become invisible at times, but the novel turns it into a nightmare - invisible but unable to "get back" and without clothes. Although why Griffin didn't make his clothes invisible too is a plot flaw.

I think Griffen is in too much of a hurry to make himself invisible. Oddly enough the first thing he makes invisible is a piece of white wool fabric. The next step should have been to try a glove to see if that would make his hand invisible, instead he tries a stray cat then himself.

It's a good little story, only a couple of hundred pages long.

Going to stick with Wells for some further reading:

Is The Door in the Wall in that volume? It's a superb tale, one of the best short stories I've ever read.

Yes it is. In fact, it's the complete collection of Wells, short stories including The Time Machine.

MarkUK wrote:

A great story The Invisible Man. I'm sure we'd all like to become invisible at times, but the novel turns it into a nightmare - invisible but unable to "get back" and without clothes. Although why Griffin didn't make his clothes invisible too is a plot flaw.

The story has been televised a few times.  I remember going to a friend's circa 1960 and watching some episodes of the 1958-60 adaptation.  Brady had some invisible clothes in that version - this was of course pre-Beatles and pre-Profumo affair so on the surface things were a bit more prim and proper than in the heyday of the swinging sixties.  I can remember one episode where the man in charge told Brady to wear his invisible clothes on a mission.

The 1984 BBC TV series was pretty good in that it stuck largely to the original plot. It's available on DVD.

On 8 April 2022 Caro mentioned reading 'Guinea Pig Club' by Emily Mayhew about the pioneering work of New Zealander Archibald McIndoe in the treatment and surgical reconstruction of badly burned pilots in WW2. I've just seen that the historian Lindsey Fitzharris has published 'The Facemaker' (June 2022) about the similar work during WW1 of another New Zealander, Sir Harold Gillies. Whereas McIndoe worked primarily with burned pilots, Gilles was mostly confronted with the disfiguring effects of shrapnel, high explosives and machineguns. Whilst in previous conflicts disfiguring facial injuries had been relatively rare, in the trenches of France and Belgium they were extremely common, with ears and noses blown off, jaws shattered, skulls broken and sometimes entire faces destroyed. Gillies initially worked simply on preserving the lives of casualties arriving from the front but at Queen's Hospital in Sidcup, he started to try and reconstruct faces and give men some hope of a more normal life. He developed techniques of taking bits of bone from patients' ribs to form cartilage for the nose, or skin from other parts of the body that could be grafted on to mens' faces to replace what they had lost. Gillies also made extensive use of photography, both as an aid to surgery and to document treatment, so Fitzharris' book likely has many, probably rather harrowing, photos.

Just finished reading this, having watched the motion picture the book is based on last week. As usual with film adaptations, some characters and events have been telescoped to fit the running time, though both book and film give an uncompromising account of the 3rd October battle.

Oddly just after reading MM's recent post about the work of reconstruction work [/url] and McIndoe on the reconstruction of injured faces, I saw just on Saturday there was a long interview on Radio NZ (the station I listen to) about these two, but I didn't hear it. If I remember I will listen to it tomorrow, but for those of you who are interested and have the best part of an hour spare, I have provided the link for it (I hope). Reconstruction work

I'm reading The Owls of Gloucester by prolific writer of mysteries based in historical times, Edward Marston.  This book is based in England during the reign of William the Conqueror.  One of the people who is investigating the murder is a Norman former soldier who has married a Saxon widow, whose family had been quite well placed socially before the Conquest but had then adapted to running a brewery (not that there's anything wrong with running a brewery).  It's (so far) a good light read.