This felt like a terrible wasted opportunity. The reception of Zola's work in English in his lifetime is an interesting topic, and Eileen Horne clearly did an enormous amount of research for it. Moreover, she's a big Zola fan who has worked on at least two Zola dramatisations in her career as a TV producer. But for some reason she chose to write up her project as a series of dramatised scenes in the style of a bad TV documentary, attributing all kinds of words, thoughts and gestures to the members of the Zola and Vizetelly families, their supporters and their enemies. As a result it's almost impossible to tell what she has invented and what comes out of the many historical sources she obviously used.

This simply doesn't make any sense: she's writing for an audience of people who are either in the process of reading twenty massive French nineteenth century novels or have already done so. We are not schoolchildren or casual museum visitors who are likely to shy away at the sight of a naked footnote: what we want from her is to be told what is known about the subject and where it's known from. She could have written a simple historical monograph with half the effort and it would have been many times more useful to readers.

It's not even as though it's an exciting, dramatic story: time and time again, (non-)events and Horne's historical conscience conspire to prevent satisfying drama. Henry Vizetelly pleaded guilty on the two occasions when he was prosecuted for obscenity, so there are no exciting Lady Chatterley-style legal arguments about the relationship of "obscenity" to literary merit and moral purpose. Even on the occasion when Frank Harris is sitting next to Vizetelly's spinster daughter Anne in the public gallery at the Old Bailey, Horne has nothing to report beyond a bit of thigh-contact. If it had been Harris himself telling the story, he would have found a way to claim that he achieved sexual congress with her under the nose of the judge...

If you can't get hold of Angus Wilson's little Zola-book from seventy years ago, it's probably worth buying this for the excellent introductory essay about translation, social prejudice and censorship by David Bellos and for Horne's bibliography and her admirably concise reading guide to the Rougon-Macquart novels. But you can safely skip the bit in the middle. ( )