Review 2779: Classics Club Spin Result! Les Misérables

After reading Les Misérables for Classics Club, there couldn’t be anyone more miserable than me. It’s true that once Hugo gets going, he can write some exciting and interesting stuff. But he is so easily sidetracked into long discussions of peripheral or even no relation to the story—and that brings the narrative to a screeching halt. FictionFan kindly called these “digressions.” I call them, in some part, showing off.

Peter Washington in the introduction to my library’s Everyman edition surprised me by describing Hugo as

. . . vain, arrogant, pompous, selfish, cold and stingy; a windbag, a humbug and a fraud, absurdly puffed up with the immensity of his own greatness.

Then he wonders how such a man could have written such a masterpiece, and that made me think about what constitutes a masterpiece or at least what gets called one. Is it just a big long book by a bloviating male? Point of discussion for Classics Club maybe.

I started faithfully, reading all of the first 50 pages of examples proving what a saint the Bishop of D— is. Now, this bishop is pivotal to the plot in that he wins the conversion of Jean Valjean to goodness, but he also dies about 50 pages later. So, did we really need 50 pages about him?

For those who have been living under a bush, here is the setup for the novel. Jean Valjean is an escaped convict originally jailed for stealing a loaf of bread when he was hungry but now on stiffer penalties because he keeps escaping. In fact, he’s a galley slave for life.

Reformed by the bishop’s example of goodness, Valjean takes on the identity of Monsieur Madeleine and becomes a productive citizen, eventually owning a factory that produces jet. However, Inspector Javert is always looking for him.

Fantine, a lovely girl, is seduced by love and left with a child. She keeps herself alive by working in Madeleine’s factory, but she has to keep her daughter a secret because of the morals requirement of the factory. She has placed Cosette with the Thenadiers, who continually ask for more money while using Cosette as a servant. Eventually, someone rats out Fantine and she loses her job and later dies. Madeleine attends her deathbed, where she asks him to save Cosette. He is on his way there when he learns that Javert has mistaken another man for himself, so he goes to court and turns himself in. Back to the galleys.

All this action takes up the first 300 pages, but don’t worry—there are 1100 more. The novel is divided into six large books, let’s call them volumes for clarity, and each volume is divided into 8-15 books, which are divided into chapters and sections that are often short but sometimes not. I eventually figured out that the start of each volume was the place to begin a digression, but this also often happened at the start of a book. And sometimes just within someone’s speech. I started skipping whole sections once I figured out what was going on, and estimate that I skipped 200-300 pages. Frankly, I couldn’t take it.

Fifty pages on the battle of Waterloo AFTER he says he’s not going to explain the battle of Waterloo just to include a short section at the end—Read

Thirty pages on Paris and the bourgeois—Skipped

Thirty pages on the Restoration of the monarchy—Skipped

Forty pages of Jean Valjean’s soul searching—Skipped

These are only the skips obvious from the contents. I also recall the entire history of the convent where Jean Valjean hides with Cosette for years (only to end with a short section about his being taken on and then hardly another mention) and the history of the Paris sewers to name a few—SKIPPED and SKIPPED.

The problem even lurks in the characters’ dialogue. There are several passages meant to show off knowledge, say of literature or Greek classics—the last absurdly by Marius’s grandfather right after he says he doesn’t like books. And the one that made me laugh was a couple of paragraphs uttered about a new weapon (just before he’s about to shoot it) that sounded like they were from an encyclopedia. No one would talk like that.

If Hugo could just have stopped himself from rampaging off in every direction, this might have been a great book, and certainly the outlines of its plot have captured imaginations over time.

Finally, I have to take issue toward the end, when Jean Valjean confesses to Marius—all the bad stuff and none of the good. Marius gets it in his head that Jean has done terrible things. He has. He’s stolen a loaf of bread, escaped from terrible servitude, lived a blameless life, given plenty to poor people, confessed to save the wrongly accused, rescued and raised Colette, saved the lives of Marius and Javert. What a rotter! He is too tough on himself, and the book gets its tear-jerker ending at his expense.