ZOLA: TRAINS

Emile Zola: Blood, Sex, Money 1.9

The 9th episode of Season 1 of Emile Zola Blood Sex and Money (Radio 4)

La Bête Humaine is one of Zola's most celebrated novels and a key literary document of Modernity. It concerns Jacques Lantier, great-grandson of Aunt Dide, in the working-class Macquart line. His mother is Gervaise Macquart (of L'Assommoir [1.5]), his sister is the actress/prostitute Anna (eponymous anti-heroine of Nana [2.1&9]), his brothers are the troubled artist Claude (L'Oeuvre [1.6&7]) and the miner Étienne (Germinal [3]). This is a damaged and doomed family and Jacques is perhaps the most troubled of the them all.

LONG VERSION OF THE PLOT: A train driver Jacques Lantier, a psychopath, spends the book struggling desperately not to give in to his murderous impulses, while all around him, in 'normal' society, people are killing without compunction. Long version here. And if you want to listen to this episode without having heard the previous one, here's a quick catch-up.

A large-scale adaptation like this involves not just the intensive mining of one's creativity but also the project-management of a huge logistical operation. What I mean by that is that writing an episode like this is not simply a matter of choosing a book and adapting it; this episode had to serve a number of very different and sometimes competing purposes.

For a start, a radio drama project on this scale could not, neither politically nor practically, be handled by only one section of the BBC. The whole project involves 27 episodes and around 24 hours of broadcast time and a considerable shifting of Radio 4's usual drama scheduling. So, although the project largely originated with BBC Salford, pretty soon BBC Scotland became involved as a partner, as did an Independent production company Sparklab. (Sparklab are the company that I have worked with, through Polly, for most things we've done together after Cavalry in 2008.) Before the writers had even met together, those 27 episodes had been allocated between those production centres. So we more or less which episodes in the weeks we would be writing before we knew anything whatever about their contents. In addition, there are different budgets attached to each production centre and, to some extent, to each slot. I'll come back to that.

I was lead writer on series 1 which meant that I had to fit the particularly books that we would be tackling that week into the 9 episodes. In addition, I'm aware that I am slated to write eps 1, 2, and 9. Obviously, there's a temptation to try gerrymandering things so that I end up with the 'best' books and leave the rest to everyone else. But of course that (a) is unethical and (b) artistically dimwitted. Organising the books into a sequence, I am partly thinking about the historical chronology of the books, partly about giving each story its best home (by which I mean, we all felt that La Bête Humaine was such a substantial story that it was worth telling over two episodes. On the other hand we thought Le Ventre de Paris [The Belly of Paris] could be told quite excitingly in a single afternoon play).

In terms of the chronology, La Fortune des Rougon [The Fortune of the Rougons], probably ought to be first; it is the genesis story of the whole saga and while there are ways we could have found this out later, we all felt that having decided to have Aunt Didi as our narrator, we ought to start with her story, which is all in the first book. The ending of La Bête Humaine takes us right up to the eve of the Second Empire's humiliating collapse at the battle of Sedan, so, again, we felt that should go last. (In November 2013, before the thing was commissioned, I put together a plan for how we would divide the books between the three seasons - which we have pretty much stuck to - and the idea was the the first two seasons would each take us through the 1860s and 1870s from different angles, both ending at the eve of war. I said this because La Bête Humaine and Nana both have very famous endings suggesting the rush to disaster and each book seemed fitting as the climax to each season. The third season would then go on on to Le Débâcle which takes us into the war, and beyond into the Paris Commune, before a final episode wrapping everything together.) So we knew the first episode and the last two and what remained was the arrange the other books thematically, chronologically, and stylistically in between these bookends.

What this meant was that, awkwardly, the two-part dramatisation of La Bête Humaine was going to be handled by two different writers, Martin Jameson for the first part and me for the second. Of course, the second episode had to follow on, as seamlessly as possible, from the first.

In addition, there were other things the episode had to do. It had to provide a sense of climax for the entire week. It also had to present some kind of thematic resolution of the week's 'blood' motif. It needed to move Didi on; we never wanted her to be an omniscient narrator, but rather someone with investments in the story and attitudes to what she's telling. And then, most weirdly, the way the finances worked, we had a smaller budget for actors for part 2 of La Bête Humaine than they did for part 1.

All of that to say, this episode was having to serve a number of different purposes - and that's before serving the novel and my own sense of what it's trying to achieve. In the original plan for the week that I put together, I thought it might be good to build this two-part adaptation around a cliffhanger, perhaps the Flore-led train crash. But Martin, looking at the book again, saw that the book falls rather more obviously into two slightly different halves. He noted that the first half of the novel might be considered best to deal itself with the murder and it's aftermath and the investigation. Once that has run into the ground so to speak and Severine and Jacques have begun their relationship, the novel pauses in a way. This seemed right to me and so you My episode begins with a certain stasis - Roubaud and Severine's marriage is in guilt-drenched loveless paralysis while Severine and Jacques's snatched moments of intimacy can't go anywhere because of her husband - but builds from there. Although Zola's characters are too unheroic for these books to be considered tragedies, there is a steely linearity to this book as each decision builds to another. We go from stasis to near-murder, to a near-crash, to a real crash, to a suicide, to another murder and then the frenzied madness of the final scene with its multiple deaths at the hand (wheel?) of a runaway train.

Steely linearity of course suggests the rails on which the trains travel. These are also, it seems to me, an image, for Zola, of the deterministic paths on which human beings are set moving. As is well known, Zola was interested in trying to bring the latest scientific and sociological thinking to bear on literary realism. While it is possible to the state this, It is striking that even in this relatively late book in the sequence, he is still interested in the forces that drive us to extreme ends. My feeling is that Zola's somewhat programmatic statements in his journalism, prefaces, and literary-critical work should be considered complementary to the novels. While Zola argues for an essentially deterministic understanding of human behaviour in the format, I like to see the books – intellectually anyway – as kind of enormous thought experiments in which we test out the possibility of thinking and feeling about human life as determined by forces over which we have no control. In other words, I think neither that the critical statements are a simple guide to how to read the books nor that the critical statements are a naive irrelevance to the books. I think we only understand the scale of soldiers achievement by taking the two together as different modes in which a scientistic analysis is offered.

It seems to me that La Bête Humaine is one of the places where Zola is testing the limits of the 'naturalist' approach to literature. There is an ambiguity in the novel about whether Jacques's biological inheritance is his psychopathic urges or his inability to repress these urges. Put another way, the part of him that battles for for the entirety of the book against his desire to kill, is that itself an inheritance or is that an expression of his free will? The former would be a deterministic answer (and one in which the outcome of that battle is itself determined) but the latter would allow room for free will. The novel's central image of the rails, as I've said, suggest that our path is pre-determined. In an early scene in my adaptation, Jacques and Pecqueux have a bickering argument about who is more important to the train:

PECQUEUX I’m the man in charge of the fire.

JACQUES What? He’s a coal-shoveller, that’s all. It’s the driver that makes it go where we want.

PECQUEUX Where we want don’t come into it. See those lines in front of us? We’re on rails. Where we’re going’s already been decided. 

The joke is, of course, that neither of them really decide where it's going, even though they are both presumably living out childhood ambitions to drive trains.

On a more personal level, there are various characters in my adaptation who look into themselves to try to understand why they are acting in this or that way but find nothing. I was teaching a lecture course on Mind and Consciousness at Royal Holloway as I was writing this and I am very interested in the difficulty, when we actually try to look at the contents of our own mind of giving any kind of accurate report of what we find there. When we look at our own mental contents, those contents seem to change (like trying to describe your dream to someone) and it is impossible - for me anyway - to stop my own beliefs about what sort of person I am from interfering with my ability to detect what sort of person I actually am, mentally anyway. I think these moments in the adaptation are continuing Zola's own experiment in trying to think through - not in the abstract form of a philosophical argument but in the immersive and richly-imagined form of a drama - the possibility of living in a world without free will.

The need to bring the whole week to a certain conclusion was felt in the continuing development of Didi's character. In the first episode it is clear that she is horrified by the behaviour of her son, Pierre, and his wife, Félicité. This is motivating a larger concern to expose the story of her family to the light. But through the week a certain ambivalence creeps in. This is her blood running through their veins, after all. At moment, it seems as if there is a certain unwilling pride being felt. And in the latter episodes there is increasingly some interaction between the teller and the tale. In the last episode, briefly, Didi seems to be talking directly to Jacques. Is this real? Or is Didi a voice in her head? Or is it somehow her blood speaking to him, an image of his poisoned inheritance? This is built much further in this episode. She starts to intervene more directly until as he stands alone with Severine in the room where he is to kill Roubaud she crowds into his head and will not get out. It is she who urges him to kill, starting with Severine. Of course, this may be only his hallucination; the scientistic Zola would certainly say so. But the episode is agnostic on this point.

The budgetary change between episode one and two had one particular casualty: Flore. Alarmingly, it became clear that Flore, who is a speaking character in Martin's episode, could not be afforded in mine. However, this challenge became an opportunity. It is very hard to have a key character present on the radio without speaking (though check out Mrs Faujas in episode 2 for an example), particularly when she is such a crucial initiator of plot as is Flore. But it seemed to me that Didi could voice her; her narration could become something close to Flaubertian indirect free style as she tells us the thoughts in the head of a young woman watching the trains. This does various things that I like: first, it brings Didi increasingly into the story, a stage on the way to her invasion of Jacques towards the end; second, it enhances that sense of Flore's mind as a blank, as discussed above; third, it tells us more about Didi - she can understand Flore because she too has loved a dangerous man (Macquart), which in turn hands us onto one of the preoccupying concerns of season 2; and fourthly, of course, it means we don't need Flore to speak herself.

The production on the episode is pretty astonishing. I can't urge you strongly enough to try listening to it on a good pair of headphones. Producer Polly Thomas and sound designer Eloise Whitmore are a brilliant team who have layered up the world of the play making it sometimes broad and epic and panoramic, almost filmic, and at times made it claustrophobic and intimate and subjective. The episode builds slowly and thrillingly, from the domestic to the national. There is a pulse of psychopathy that runs through the episode - voices in the distance urging Jacques to kill, picking up images from the world around him and making them resonate sinisterly in his mind - and they've done this beautifully with swirls of sound that keep us unsettled, guessing what world we're in.

And the trains that thunder through the book and the episode they have brought to wonderful life a way that gives the episode power and momentum and steely horror. It's the trains and the anomie that make this book such a strong document of modernity. It's all futurist speed and social blankness. And I love the ending, with the train thundering out of control towards the eastern front, with Didi, half-horrified, half-exhilarated, telling us:

Like a mad magnificent beast let loose on the field of battle. Who knows where it will end? What blood will be spilled before it is satisfied? It is not for us to know; it is only for us to watch and see. For this is the future and these are the days, my children, these are the very days.

If you’re interested, you can read my script HERE.