Jean-Christophe, Volume 3: Love and Friendship, The Burning Bush, The New Dawn by Romain Rolland

Lost among the supporting cast

French author Romain Rolland won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature shortly after publishing what is considered his magnum opus, a series of ten novels under the collective title of Jean-Christophe. This saga chronicles the life and career of fictional composer Jean-Christophe Krafft, who was born and raised in Germany but spends much of his life in France. When these ten novels were published in English translation, they were released in three volumes. The third of these volumes, sometimes appearing under the title of Jean-Christophe: Journey’s End, consists of novels eight, nine, and ten of Rolland’s series, respectively titled Love and Friendship, The Burning Bush, and The New Dawn.

The most surprising and disappointing aspect of this third volume of Jean-Christophe is just how small a part the title character actually plays in these last three volumes. Rolland seems to have become bored with his composer protagonist and feels the need to veer off into the life story of every supporting character in the series. Christophe barely appears in Love and Friendship. Instead, that novel focuses largely on his best friend and former roommate Olivier. The main plot concerns Olivier’s troubled marriage, but the reader is also treated to the back stories of Olivier’s friends and neighbors, his wife Jacqueline, and her family.

Olivier is still prominent in the first half of The Burning Bush, but the plot moves in a different direction when Christophe gets halfheartedly involved with the Socialist movement in Paris. In the second half of the ninth volume, a new woman enters Christophe’s life. One can clearly see the predictable direction where this is going and can only reluctantly ride out Christophe’s poor judgment and the impending certain disaster of that relationship. Much emotional angst ensues, and the reader’s eye rolls continue when the previously independent and freethinking Christophe finds God.

The final novel, The New Dawn, is a bit of an improvement over the previous two. At least it contains a trace of optimism in a new romance for Christophe, and he finally starts to show some maturity. Christophe moves around quite a bit over the course of these novels, from Germany to France to Switzerland and to Italy. This gives Rolland the opportunity to comment upon the national spirit of these different countries and cultures. In the early novels this felt more like stereotyping, but here at the end one can see Rolland sketching the mindset of Europe leading up to World War I. This historical commentary is probably the Jean-Christophe saga’s saving grace. Rolland also includes much commentary on the arts, but Christophe’s music career really gets lost in these last three novels. Christophe’s old age, however, allows Rolland to illustrate the cyclical process by which each generation of artists starts out as revolutionary youths and then matures and mellows with age.

Rolland was primarily known as a Romantic writer, but here in Jean-Christophe he ventures somewhat unsuccessfully into Naturalism, trying to illustrate how lives are molded by heredity and social forces. Unlike the naturalist masterworks of Emile Zola, however, there is no apparent master plan to Jean-Christophe. The narrative just seems to meander haphazardly, veering off into spontaneous digressions. The first few novels in Volume 1 of Jean-Christophe are quite captivating, but the series only loses steam as it moves forward and fails to live up to the promise of Christophe’s youth. This last and weakest of the three volumes is a struggle to get through.
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