Lourdes

by Emile Zola
A bit of a mixed bag. Zola deals well with the crisis of faith experienced by the hero Pierre, and despite his personal views, lays out the conflicts between faith and rationalism in a realistic way. However, he also wants to tell us the story of Bernadette and point out the problems of Lourdes as an institution. In fact he wants to do a lot of things and in my view spends too long doing them such that it becomes in part repetitive.
There are a host of characters in the book but I could only engage with Pierre and Marie and her father. The other characters were either too similar or too vague to find that interesting. Like all Zola the naturalism is outstanding and the descriptions of some of the sick can induce nausea, but the detail of the train journey was fascinating as was the description of Lourdes itself. However, not one of his best 5/10