This may be heresy to admirers of Victor Hugo, but the main idea of “Les Miserables” is absurd, you know:
A relentless, 20-year chase of a saintly ex-convict, Jean Valjean, by a monomaniacal police inspector named Javert. An absurd idea propelled absurdly along by its primary plot mechanism, a wildly improbable series of coincidences.
But absurdity and outrageous coincidence are the stock-in-trade of the movies, so it is no surprise that “Les Miserables” has been filmed so often. Six versions from 1935 to 1998 are listed in “Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide.”
Then, of course, there is the magnificent story. The ecstasy and the genius of “Les Miserables,” as literature, rather than film, lie in how wonderfully Hugo triumphs over these absurdities. The telling of the story (marvelously captured in this new unabridged translation by Julie Rose) is so splendid that, for the reader, a job of work becomes a labor of love in observing how Hugo has snatched dramatic art from the jaws of melodrama.
Every third novel that comes off the presses these days, especially if it’s fat, is trumpeted as an “epic,” but this is one fat book that really is an epic. It achieves that state by satisfying in such a variety of ways. For one thing, it offers one of the most delightful pleasures of fiction: learning about other worlds and other times.
Then there is Hugo’s sympathy for “les miserables” themselves, the background population of the novel:
“Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful word. They are les miserables — the outcasts, the underdogs.”
While it is far from a swashbuckler, “Les Miserables” more than occasionally is exciting, as when Valjean, briefly returned to prison, saves a seaman’s life, or when he is almost buried alive.
And, of course, the famous Paris sewers scene. I guarantee that you will read every word, every article, definite and indefinite, of Valjean’s struggle to escape through the pestilential sewers carrying Marius on his back. Having pushed through more than 1,000 pages, you are not going to balk at slogging through the cloacal muck with the hero.
Even Hugo’s scholarly tangent on the history of the sewers is fascinating. This, however, is a rare instance in a progression of tangents, most of which are eminently scannable, even skippable. You quickly develop a feeling for what can be scanned and what must be closely attended to.
The formidable length also is eased by the short chapters that help create a sense of reading progress.
It is a treat to gradually become aware of literary devices at work. Valjean appears again and again in various guises, and, though he is never immediately identified, you know who he is, yet you are caught up in the transparent suspense.
There is the great expansiveness that Hugo allows himself in developing, in numerous sections, dozens of situations and characters until they converge in a new stage of the story. At one point, the story moves ahead with Valjean’s travails, then it doubles back to pick up how Javert renews both his suspicions and the chase. It is a device used more than once, and a clever one.
Basically the book’s structure is like a funnel, with everything narrowing until the remaining characters, whose paths have crossed and recrossed so many times, merge into the pressure of one great denouement — the recognition of Jean Valjean and of his goodness.
Very far into the novel, Hugo writes:
“The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one to the other . . . treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth . . . from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God.”
Those are not just words; Hugo is not just posturing. His novel really does all that. You may tire of its length. You never tire of its story.
Roger K. Miller, author of the novel “Invisible Hero,” writes the blog .
Fiction
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo; translated by Julie Rose, $28
