At the Lower End of My Penguin Recommendations, 30 Nov 2002
I once challenged myself to read all the Penguin Classics in the Viking catalogue. I think I've made it through about 70% of the listings and feel rewarded for the effort. I couldn't recall much about this one, so I re-read it recently. Its not a work that I would wholeheartedly recommend. Anatole France, like Flaubert, is known for "le mot juste," however Flaubert was a greater craftsman than France (whose real name was Jacques Thilbault). Perhaps there is need of a better translation. Even the title in this Penguin edition is misleading. There is no reference to "Blood" in the original (Les Dieux ont soif).
The story follows the upwardly mobile path of Evariste Gamelin, a young Parisian painter and student of the reknowned Jacques Louis David (whose famous portrait of Marat lying assassinated in his bathtub adorns the cover of the Peguin edition). Gamelin is one of those single-minded idealists who show up wherever and whenever there is a revolution to be fought. His hero is Robespierre, and while Robespierre's star is in the ascendent, during the Reign of Terror, Gamelin's star shines too. He is transformed from struggling artist to magistrate on the Revolutionary Tribunal. He also passes from a rather meek lover of humanity, who engages in such altruistic acts of kindness as giving half his last loaf of bread to a hungry mother and her child, to a monstrous, indiscriminate killing machine, sending innocent victims by the droves to their deaths. He settles scores with most of the characters in the novel, sending them to the guillotine sometimes for personal reasons, at other times simply as a matter of implimenting his messianic impulses. Eventually the bloody excesses of Gamelin and his ilk serve to inflame the populace, who turn on Robespierre and his Jacobin followers, Gamelin included.
Frederick Davies, the translator of this edition, contends that "The Gods Will Have Blood is not only the greatest novel Anatole France wrote, it is one of the greatest of French novels." I strongly disagree. I don't see Anatole France even approaching such novelists as Flaubert, Hugo, Huysmans, Gide, Stendhal, etc. This work is definitely of the second rank as well. The novel is structured rather clumsily. France spends almost the entire first half of the book on exposition. Plot and characterization serve primarily as vehicles for France's polemics. The writing is static, the descriptions highly conventional. There is no comparison to Hugo, Flaubert or Stendhal, who wrote historical novels but invested them with riveting characters and who all had a wonderful eye for detail. Flaubert labored and struggled over each word in his novels, but the finished result was seamless. One is not aware of the labor when reading, one simply enjoys the result and is caught up in the narrative. With France, one is conscious of the labor and the fussing and fumbling. He tries very hard, but the mechanics are flawed and the operation is exposed in all its frailty.
If you want to read a good treatment of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that ensued, I would suggest Carlyle. Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities is naturally the most famous novel covering the period, but I'm not a Dickens fan. As you can judge from my reaction to this book, I'm not a big Anatole France fan either, though Penguin Island was at least mildly entertaining.
