Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo's celebrated and epic depiction of early nineteenth-century French society is now best known as the popular Broadway musical. The novel, published in 1862, is a veritable behemoth, perhaps even more ambitious in scale than Tolstoy's War and Peace. Norman Denny, the translator in the Penguin classics edition, does his best to tame the extravagant narrative but with limited success. The sheer weight of the physical volume made it difficult to hold for long periods of time, thus significantly lengthening the time it took to finish reading. The story follows the plight of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict struggling to rejoin society and follow the path of virtue. Cosette, the orphaned daughter of a dead prostitute, is the key to Valjean's salvation, whilst his inscrutable nemesis, the police inspector Javert, seeks to return him to justice. Meanwhile, tensions are brewing in Paris as poverty, destitution, and political unrest come to a head.

Throughout his lifetime, Hugo converted from Bonapartist republican to socialist, a movement which delayed and heavily impacted the writing of Les Misérables. The text is imbued with his political sympathies and can be overly didactic and exasperating at times. With no regard for the disciple of novel writing, Hugo self-indulgently loads the narrative with completely unnecessary digressions, elaborations, homilies, and disquisitions. A major example of this includes the exhaustive (and probably historically inaccurate) account of the Battle of Waterloo, an interpolation which runs on for nineteen tedious chapters and bear no relevance to the main story. Other deviations include a sermon on the evils of convents, Argot, a type of cant used by the criminal underworld, fifteen pages on the history of the Paris sewage system, and various chapters dedicated to lists of now forgotten and irrelevant political personages and events of the time. The translator has prudently removed some of these to the appendix.

The story itself is engaging and at times profoundly moving, if one can ignore the overabundance of histrionics and melodrama. Marius Pontmercy, a misty-eyed revolutionary introduced halfway through the novel who becomes a love interest for Cosette, is a portrait of a young Victor Hugo. Despite his later 'heroics', he is without doubt a thoroughly unlikeable stalker who might be issued  with a restraining order by today's standards. Valjean, cast as the pathos-ridden outsider, is also unexempt from creepiness, particularly in his obsession with Cosette. My favourite characters were the villainous yet comic Thenardiers; an abusive married couple who go from swindling innkeepers to desperate thieves. By casting poverty and criminality in varying shades of light and darkness, Hugo avoids the trap of oversimplifying his binaries, and instead manages to create a complex tapestry revealing the various nuances and fallibility of human nature. I would recommend a heavily abridged version of this novel.

Rating: 2/5