If only she had the power, she would have destroyed all the money in the world, as one would crush disease underfoot to save the world's health.

Money is a bit of a slog, to be honest, and certainly not Zola at his height. Most of his strengths are still in evidence: a clear-eyed writing style, characters deeply at odds with one another while acting entirely in concert with their own biases and world views, gorgeous and expansive passages of symbolism contrasted with intricate moments of character analysis, and an understanding of why systems fail even when individuals are not consciously aiming for them to do so. (A while back, I was describing the series to a removalist mid-move, and he suggested it sounded like 2000s TV series The Wire; in many ways, I think he was right!)

Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, has come a long way from the opportunistic young reporter we met in The Fortune of the Rougons, via his rise-fall-rerise which we witnessed in The Kill. Here, he sets about on a grand moneymaking scheme that combines the Second Empire love of gold with their deep desire to support Catholic goals in the face of what many of them saw as barbarism in the Middle East and opportunism from the Jewish community. That rampant French anti-semitism is on full display here, primarily in Saccard himself, who loses his cool primarily when ranting about the Jewish menace. Even he, the great master-manipulator, seems to genuinely believe in his mission for a new Christian paradise in Jerusalem, the dream which brings so many of his investors onboard. (Aside from a single but powerful line of dialogue late in the novel, where Madame Caroline suggests the Jews may be people like the rest of us, apart only because we made them be, Zola leaves it to the reader to appreciate that the anti-semitism is the character's and not the author's. But 19th century French audiences knew, as most of us do still, of Zola's fierce passion for equality and his opposition to anti-semitism, which would emerge in full force only a few years after this novel was published, when the Dreyfus Case took place and he became the voice to expose France's bigoted underbelly.)

Saccard's plan is quite simple, really: overvalue his company shares, buy up some reliable newspapers to promote the stability of the stock, and make use of every connection he has developed in Paris over the past 15 years, to create the ultimate financial windfall which will benefit a great plan of construction in the Near East. Maybe even, in his wildest dreams, recapture the glory of the Silk Road. We are immediately suspicious, as the original audience were intended to be, only here Zola doesn't leave it to chance. From early on, the narrator interrupts his already ominous symbolism to give us clear foreboding that a fall is on the horizon. We are watching a very, very slow car crash, and we are powerless to stop it.

I am a helpless Zola acolyte, but Money is a lesser member of the flock. It is partly the subject matter. It is not that Zola treats economic matters simply; indeed, this is as complex a tapestry as he has ever worked with. But one feels that there are few entry points. One did not have to be a miner to appreciate Germinal or a retailer to appreciate The Ladies' Paradise; he invited us in and gave us all the information in breathtaking detail. Here, the footnotes are having to work overtime to explain concepts of banking and speculation. (Less at fault is the simple issue of historical nuance; the stock exchange in 1860s France is inevitably more removed from us than, say, a story about a love affair.) As always, Zola uses a narrative voice particular to this novel, saturating every page with figures and stock prices. It feels germane and thematically whole, but this is not enough to make it interesting.

The numerous subplots have their moments but the minor characters generally feel like they are somewhat unmoored. Compare this to the peasants of Earth, for example, and much is found wanting. I locate this issue primarily in a development I have noticed in Zola's works immediately preceding this. The author is becoming ever-so-slightly more didactic; he is less patient, less willing to let the reader come to terms with the novel on their own. (Around this time, he was fond of saying he might enter politics once he had finished the Rougon-Macquart; it did not eventuate, but his need to be the old professor would make itself known in his writings late in life.) In the previous novels, the moralising never overwhelmed the story. In Money, however, it feels like every character is a symbol first and a person second. Saccard's two sons both feature: witty, wealthy, bisexual Maxime (whom we met in The Kill) and wolf-like child of the streets Victor (of whom Saccard was unaware until this novel). Yet every time they appear, it is as if they have been experiencing a separate narrative in another novel until Zola remembered them and dragged them back to Money to make another point.

The biggest victim of this symbolic approach, alas, is Madame Caroline herself. Caroline's brother is the co-founder of Saccard's plan although is absent in the Middle East for much of the novel. Caroline gradually becomes Saccard's lover (the exact level of intimacy is left unclear) but she is an educated woman who quickly discerns that not all is above board with the Universal Bank. Frustratingly, after a lovely introductory chapter in which her layers are shaded in, Zola keeps us at a psychological remove from Caroline, as with every other character in the novel, instead simply telling us on occasion that she has become more suspicious and then let it go, showing not telling, in a manner unlike his usual approach. In short, I suppose, my qualm with the novel is that the strings are showing. One supporting character starts out agnostic toward Saccard, develops a reason to hate him, is maneuvered into a position of power that he could one day use against him, and then finally gets the chance. But it never feels authentic or clever; it just seems like the inevitable outcome of a fairytale. And we already had a fairytale with The Dream; we don't need another!

To be fair to Zola, Money eventually softens into an enjoyable narrative. The latter half is better than the first; the latter quarter is better than the three that preceded it. But there's a tough shell to crack just to find what remains of the yolk underneath. As always, though, when he wants to develop a symbol, Zola delivers beyond our wildest dreams. When the novel ends in mid-1869, it becomes clear why Money needed to be one of the volumes in the series, and why it had to come so late. Paris is decimated by a stock crash, a seemingly literal monster child is roaming the streets uncontrolled, the government is making dangerous concessions to its opponents, shipping individual criminals into exile while ignoring the broader systemic issues, and the one man who saw a different way forward for society is dead, his beautiful dreams of a socialist paradise without money having been literally torn up, too weak to compete with the fantasies of those for whom gold is the inevitable master. War is coming, and the Empire - we know - is doomed. But at least, Zola finds in the final pages, there is something about we humans that gives us the bewildering ability to keep hope alive. ( )

If the previous book in the series was Zola's answer to Crime and punishment, this one seems to be his take on The way we live now. But with more nude scenes than Trollope, and fewer trips to Lowestoft...

Zola brings back Saccard, the tycoon from 16 books ago in La curée; if you were paying attention you'll recall that he is the elder brother of Eugène Rougon, the minister. Saccard seems to have inherited the same bounce-back ability that characterises his brother's career: here, in the mid-1860s, we see him moving rapidly from the collapse of his property empire to a new career in the even murkier world of the stock market, setting up the immodestly-named Banque Universelle to invest in steamships, railways and mines in the Middle East, and using every trick in the book, legal and illegal, to boost the apparent value of the company and its share price. Soon it seems that there isn't a distressed gentlewoman or retired civil servant in France who hasn't put their meagre savings into Universelle stock.

Naturally, all the wheeling and dealing and the strange day-to-day workings of the stock market are described in loving detail, as are many other direct and indirect manifestations of money in Second Empire lives, most of which ultimately lead down to the broker in bad debts and blackmailer, Broch. But what Zola is really interested in is not so much the mechanics of finance but the way that people get emotionally involved with money. Saccard is fond of saying that money is like sex: most of the time we chase it for the short-term pleasure and excitement it brings, and sometimes that pursuit is dirty and nasty, but without all that dirt and guilty pleasure we wouldn't produce any children. Saccard is a fraudster who ruins hundreds of people's lives, but the companies financed by his schemes also produce improvements to the quality of life for many others — jobs, transportation, toys for the children in the orphanage. Meanwhile, the communist thinker, Sigismound, produces precisely nothing. Zola isn't quite defending capitalism, but he's at least ambivalent about it. It's pretty clear that he as a novelist would have little to write about in the ideal Marxist world that Sigismound imagines, for a start!

Naturally, there's more going on than this: The rise and fall of Saccard — with his sexual adventures, his colonial excursions, his ambiguous relationship with the Church, his half-baked charity work, his frequent Napoleonic analogies, his own private Universal Exposition and his rabid anti-semitism — are clearly supposed to parallel the career of Napoleon III and his corrupt state, for a start.

A nice feature of this book is the way it takes an independent-minded, mature woman, Caroline, as the main viewpoint character. She's a little bit in love with Saccard, but not enough to prevent her seeing through him and maintaining a moderately safe distance.

Not one of the real heavyweights of the series, but still a very interesting novel. ( )

[Money] continues the story of Aristide Saccard, last encountered as a speculator nonpareil in The Kill . A year after the spectacular ball at the end of The Kill] Saccard is bankrupt and a widower. Sitting alone at a window table in Champeaux, the restaurant for financial traders where he had once held court, Saccard found himself an outsider, excluded, a person whose bad fortune just might be contagious.

Contemplating the wild swings of fortune since his arrival in Paris sixteen years earlier, he realized

he had never been able to make fortune his slave... at his disposal, alive, real, and kept under lock and key. His coffers had always been full of lies and fictions, with mysterious holes that seemed to drain away their gold. And now here he was back on the street again, just as he started out long ago, ... never satisfied, and still tortured by the same need... He had tasted everything without ever satisfying his appetite... Now he felt quite wretched, a good deal worse off than a mere beginner, who would have hope and illusion to sustain him. He was seized by a frenzied desire to start all over again, to conquer once more, to rise even higher than before and at last plant his foot firmly on the conquered city. No longer with the facade of mendacious wealth but the solid edifice of fortune, the true royalty of gold, reigning over well-filled bags of wealth.

Just as he was leaving the restaurant, he had a brief encounter with Gundermann, "the banker-king, master of the Bourse and the world". Gundermann is based on the powerful Baron de Rothschild. Saccard hated Gundermann, hated his secure position. Later in the novel Saccard's strong anti-semitism and hatred of Gundermann consume him. This hatred was a sentiment Zola did not share, but he uses it here both as a reflection of what was actually happening in France, and as a character flaw reflecting Saccard's low born origins, a continuation of Zola's exploration of the effects of heredity and environment. This chance encounter did spur Saccard to follow up on his musings and create his own institution, the Universal Bank, in an effort to destroy Gundermann.

Once again, Zola sets Saccard firmly in his place and time. The Universal Exhibition brought the world to Paris in 1867. Saccard's fortunes rose along with those of Emperor Napoleon III and the city of Paris. Intoxicated with it all, to him,

...this exaltation of the Universal shares, this ascension, carrying them up as if on a divine wind, seemed to harmonize with the louder and louder music from the Tuileries and the Champs de Mars, and the continual festivities with which the Exhibition was driving Paris mad. ... there was no evening when the blazing city did not sparkle under the stars like some colossal palace, in the depths of which, debauchery went on until dawn. Joy had spread from house to house, the streets were an intoxication, a cloud of animal vapours, cooking smells from the feastings, the sweat of couplings, all rolling away to the horizon, carrying over the rooftops the nights of Sodom, Babylon, and Nineveh.

Saccard emerges as a more complex character in this novel than in [The Kill], written eighteen years earlier. His restless drive and energy are linked to more complex and focussed plans than the mere acquisition of money. The building of the Suez Canal presented opportunities for expansion in banking, transport and construction that fired him. His relationships with women are more developed here too, especially with Caroline Hamelin, herself more complex than previous female characters of Zola's.

This 2014 translation by Valerie Minogue is the first unabridged translation into English and the first new translation into English since the nineteenth century. It gives the reader insights into Saccard previously unavailable due to the work of the nineteenth century American and English censors. In her Translator's Note, Minogue says the nineteenth century translators regretted the parts they had to leave out. One even invented new passages to account for the gaps created by such omissions.

In the Introduction, Minogue quotes Zola; "It's very difficult to write a novel about money. It's cold, icy, lacking in interest..." She says he wanted to avoid the conventional views of it as an evil and show instead "its generous and fecund power, its expansive force". This novel does that brilliantly, showing the reader not only the expected greed and scandals, but digging deeper, creating an excitement over supposedly mundane topics like the workings of the Bourse, credit, and money bills, so that the reader becomes as enthralled as Saccard with the minutiae behind it all. Above all, it offers an insight into the soul of a gambler and recognizes the obsession that becomes life itself.

A bit simplified and didactic but can still be used to understand speculation. Good read anyway. ( )

This novel continues the story of Saccard, born Rougon, the whirlwind of real estate speculation, money obsession, and sexual drive who, along with his wife Renée, now dead, made reading The Kill such an anticipation of a train wreck. As this book starts, Saccard has fallen on hard times, no longer living in his magnificently gaudy house, but instead renting in the home of princess who has devoted herself to good works after the death of her philandering and corrupt husband. Saccard becomes the manager of one of those good works, the Work Foundation, a combination of a beautifully designed home for children otherwise living troubled lives on the streets of Paris with a conviction that a life of work will enable them to become productive citizens. In the home of the princess, he meets a brother and sister who also live there and who had traveled in the Middle East. Looking at the drawings and paintings the sister, Madame Caroline, made of the sights they saw while the brother, Hamelin, was working as an engineer, he starts dreaming of a bank that could make development possible there: steamer lines, silver mines, train systems. With his vivid imagination, his natural salesman abilities, his temperamental optimism, and his never-ending persistence, he raises the capital for a bank, the Universal, finding rich people of various sorts to participate. As time passes, Hamelin starts building the proposed projects using these investments; Saccard raises additional capital again and again (with a lot of wheeler-dealering and a little illegality); and the share prices keep rising on the Bourse. Both Madame Caroline and Hamelin have some reservations about Saccard's methods but, with his visions of creating good through money they largely keep them to themselves; indeed, for a time, Caroline becomes his mistress.

The subplots in this book introduce not only other characters, but also other ways people are obsessed with money. A thoroughly unpleasant pair consists of Busch and La Méchain: he combs through documents to find ways to blackmail people and she is his spy, tracking people down, gathering documents, and being thoroughly nasty. When she first sees Saccard, she sees a resemblance between him and her cousin's son, a boy she conceived after being brutally raped; on the cousin's behalf, Busch has been holding notes promising payments of 600 francs to the mother. The tale of Victor, now a teenager, who later Madame Caroline finds living in conditions of unbelievable squalor in a vividly described slum, and who is a completely vicious boy, is a thread that runs through the book.

Another important character is Gundermann, an elderly man who is "king" of the Bourse and, importantly for Saccard, who is violently antisemitic, Jewish. Part of the reason he wants to overthrow Gundermann is because he wants his bank, a "Catholic" bank to rule the world of finance. He and other characters frequently make antisemitic remarks or have antisemitic thoughts. With this angle, Zola was reflecting the antisemitism of the time, largely based on the idea that Jews had a natural talent for finance and ruled the financial world, without of course believing this himself.

Many other permutations of the raging desire for money -- and a few variations on rejecting money -- occur in this book. There are people from all walks of life who gamble all their money on the Universal stock, and by and large they are people who can ill afford it, although they are seduced by Saccard's vision and by the fact that the share price keeps rising. Some people are smart enough to sell, but they are far and few between. In addition, Zola examines the issue of capitalism itself: Busch has a brother Sigismund of whom he is extremely fond, who is dying of tuberculosis and who is a committed socialist, working away on a book that will convince its readers that the abolition of money will bring in a new world of harmony and justice.

Of course, being a book by Zola, this isn't just a novel of ideas, but a novel of characters and action and of course a few sexual adventures, most of them sleazy and not a little mean. It is a complex book, and I probably haven't done it justice here.

As a side note, I was delighted to find this Oxford World Classics edition in a bookstore; as the cover notes, this is the first translation in more than a hundred years, and the only unabridged translation. (It is easy to see why the original translator would have cut some of the material in this book.) It also had a helpful introduction and useful endnotes.