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A review by crankylibrarian
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
5.0
Wow. And I thought the musical was a masterpiece.
Like all great literature, Les Miz manages to be both completely of its time and yet eternally relevant. Whether he's describing the tender, yet fraught relationship between parents and children, or the intricacies of a small town economy, Hugo makes the everyday seem transcendent. A sharply observant critique of political, sexual, religious and social hypocrisy (I found myself pondering Hughes' criteria for justifiable revolution during the BLM protests), it is also a profound meditation on what it means to be a truly moral person.
One of the problems with the musical is that redemption comes to Jean Valjean fairly easily: one dinner with the Archbishop and bang! he's a changed man. But that's not how it works in real life and it's not how it works in the novel either. It takes another crime before Valjean begins his moral awakening, a crime that will haunt him far longer than stealing that loaf of bread. Even when he does the right thing, it's painful and difficult: when he decides to reveal his crimes to exonerate another convict, it requires a lengthy, accident and weather plagued carriage journey, giving him ample excuses to give up. But he doesn't. And after rescuing Marius from the barricades, and hours of staggering through the sewers with his daughter's boyfriend on his back, he carefully lays the boy down, cleans his wounds, and "gazed at him in that half-light with an inexpressible hatred". Being good is HARD...and a constant struggle.
Hugo was an ardent advocate of penal reform, yet he was no sentimental naif. His description of the sordid ugliness of poverty, and its degrading effect on human relations is sobering, yet his true contempt is for the casual cruelty of the rich; the scene where a middle class business man and his "well fed" child throw bread to a swan, ("because we should always be kind to animals") as opposed to a pair of starving children is chilling. He was also able to see the humanity beneath the ugliness: Fantine, after shaving her head to provide for Cosette happily sings, "I have clothed my child with my hair", while street rat Eponine spontaneously waters an old man's garden, "distributing life all around her". Even swaggering little Gavroche proves a kind and compassionate guardian to lost children.
There is so much more to say, that has already been said about this extraordinary novel: the history, the critiques of royalism and revolution, the gentle mockery of student idealists, the fascinating characters we barely see in the play: good time guy Grantaire, redeemed by his love for Enjolras; crotchety M. Guillenormand and his prideful tug of war with his rebellious grandson Marius; and the shameless, fiendishly clever Thenardier, a born survivor, able to transform at will into whatever guise will evoke the most sympathy. I'll close with a line which sums up Hugo's attitude towards the blinkered people of his own generation, and of ours:
“They deplored the age they lived in, which saved them the bother of having to understand it”.
Like all great literature, Les Miz manages to be both completely of its time and yet eternally relevant. Whether he's describing the tender, yet fraught relationship between parents and children, or the intricacies of a small town economy, Hugo makes the everyday seem transcendent. A sharply observant critique of political, sexual, religious and social hypocrisy (I found myself pondering Hughes' criteria for justifiable revolution during the BLM protests), it is also a profound meditation on what it means to be a truly moral person.
One of the problems with the musical is that redemption comes to Jean Valjean fairly easily: one dinner with the Archbishop and bang! he's a changed man. But that's not how it works in real life and it's not how it works in the novel either. It takes another crime before Valjean begins his moral awakening, a crime that will haunt him far longer than stealing that loaf of bread. Even when he does the right thing, it's painful and difficult: when he decides to reveal his crimes to exonerate another convict, it requires a lengthy, accident and weather plagued carriage journey, giving him ample excuses to give up. But he doesn't. And after rescuing Marius from the barricades, and hours of staggering through the sewers with his daughter's boyfriend on his back, he carefully lays the boy down, cleans his wounds, and "gazed at him in that half-light with an inexpressible hatred". Being good is HARD...and a constant struggle.
Hugo was an ardent advocate of penal reform, yet he was no sentimental naif. His description of the sordid ugliness of poverty, and its degrading effect on human relations is sobering, yet his true contempt is for the casual cruelty of the rich; the scene where a middle class business man and his "well fed" child throw bread to a swan, ("because we should always be kind to animals") as opposed to a pair of starving children is chilling. He was also able to see the humanity beneath the ugliness: Fantine, after shaving her head to provide for Cosette happily sings, "I have clothed my child with my hair", while street rat Eponine spontaneously waters an old man's garden, "distributing life all around her". Even swaggering little Gavroche proves a kind and compassionate guardian to lost children.
There is so much more to say, that has already been said about this extraordinary novel: the history, the critiques of royalism and revolution, the gentle mockery of student idealists, the fascinating characters we barely see in the play: good time guy Grantaire, redeemed by his love for Enjolras; crotchety M. Guillenormand and his prideful tug of war with his rebellious grandson Marius; and the shameless, fiendishly clever Thenardier, a born survivor, able to transform at will into whatever guise will evoke the most sympathy. I'll close with a line which sums up Hugo's attitude towards the blinkered people of his own generation, and of ours:
“They deplored the age they lived in, which saved them the bother of having to understand it”.