Therese Raquin - Zola

 THERESE RAQUIN - ZOLA

Does anybody nowadays read books by 18th Century writers of ill repute? No, thought not. Written in 1867, could a book from that long ago have any relevance to today's world? Could such a book have stood the test of time? The answer to both is, of course, yes. In fact, Emile Zola's book, Therese Raquin, is surprisingly still relevant if not so much to the modern world but to the human condition.

Though habits may change, human nature isn't a moveable feast but remains pretty well fixed. Whether or not this is actually a good thing is open to debate though the smart money says it's a double-edged sword. Human nature is obviously what has got us this far but at the same time it's going to be our undoing unless we take stock of ourselves and turn both inwards to become more self-aware and outwards to become more aware of others.

So, Zola's book is a story of human nature taking its natural course when presented with a particular situation, that situation being adultery. What to do when a husband is in the way of lust and a better life? One option though certainly not the only one is to remove the husband from the equation and this is exactly what Therese and her lover Laurent do by pushing Therese's husband into the Seine whereupon he is drowned.

To avoid the guillotine they bide their time and through the manipulation of others around them wait for the right moment to come together without any suspicion being roused. During that period of laying low, however, with Therese playing the part of the grieving widow and Laurent playing the loyal friend of the husband, guilt gestates until finally it is all that is left. Raw, horrific, relentless and unassailable guilt manifested as visions of the rotting cadaver of the husband forever in their minds and at their sides.

Zola's book turns from morality play, to murder plot to full-blown horror story without missing a trick or skipping a beat. It's reminiscent at times, even, of the kind of story Stanley Kubrick would make into a film, a la The Shining. There is an atmosphere of desperate dread throughout and a constant attempt at trying to escape that dread by any and all means. There's a claustrophobia about it - the kind that might be felt if buried alive and trapped in a coffin. If hell is other people, as Sartre stated, then Therese Raquin epitomizes this and shows us that through our helplessness we are the architects of our own doom. Blown on the winds by forces that Zola calls Naturalism or in other words an absence of free will. Controlled entirely by our nervous systems and cast adrift in - what that other great philosopher, Woody Allen, once put it as - a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

All good, fun stuff, of course.

John Serpico