All right, with economics out of the way, let me get to Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. I intend to start commenting on the book, only, and then go to the movie and see how it compares.
Les Miserables is, I suppose, the French equivalent of a Russian novel -- immensely long (over 1400 pages), meandering, with a huge cast of characters and many detours before it reaches the end. It also shows the influence of Dickens -- there are so many far-fetched coincidences that you know someone must have an improbability drive in his pocket.
Nineteen years before the story begins, Jean Valjean, a poor peasant, breaks into a bakery and steals a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children. For that he is sentenced to five years on the chain gang. He is sent guilty as charged, but innocent and pure at heart. Instead of sensibly serving out his time, he keeps madly, irrationally escaping or attempting to escape and having more time added. Finally, nineteen years later, in 1815, only months after the Battle of Waterloo, he is released, hardened and brutalized by his long imprisonment. Because he is a convict, he is treated as a social outcast and everyone turns him away, except a saintly bishop who invites him in and offers him dinner and a bed. Valjean repays his host's generosity by stealing his silver spoons. When the police catch him, the bishop says the spoons were a gift, and gives him the candle sticks as well, saying, "Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God." But even after that, Jean Valjean steals a two-franc piece from a chimney sweep. That theft is vitally important, because the bishop has denied that the spoons were stolen, and so that theft is not counted. But after robbing the chimney sweep, Valjean has become a repeat offender and will face a life sentence if caught. However, after committing one last offense and becoming a marked-for-life man, Valjean finally and truly repents and becomes a saint. The book is about his life and career as a saint.
Writing about a saint is always difficult. The author is constantly faced with the traps of either making the hero boring or making the reader hate him. I intend to post more extensively on this in the near future. For now, let us just say that Hugo mostly manages to pull it off, with a few exceptions that I shall dwell on (at length). Anyone reading a 1400+ page book will naturally have to emphasize and de-emphasize different parts of it. Many people, it appears, focus on the conflict between Valjean and Inspector Javert, the policeman who becomes strangely obsessed with Valjean and determined to capture him. People are fascinated with Javert because, although a villain, he is not wholly evil, just very narrow-minded and legalistic. There is something oddly admirable in Javert's dogged persistence and determination that the law be enforced down to the last jot and tittle.
Javert does not hold the same fascination for me that he does for some people. To me, the novel centers around Valjean's three great crises of conscience as a saint. After jumping parole and starting a new life, Valjean goes to work in a factory making black glass jewelry. He develops a cheaper material to use and a simpler way of making the clasp and makes his fortune with these inventions. (How he makes his fortune is not made clear. One would think he would have to get a patent, which would necessarily mean reveling himself, but let that go). He ends up as a factory owner and uses his wealth to endow schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and so forth, and to make the world better, even becoming mayor of the town and leading with great wisdom and ability. His first crisis occurs when an innocent man is arrested as Valjean, and he has to decide between maintaining all he has built and revealing himself to keep an innocent man from being unjustly imprisoned for life.
Heightening the crisis is that he is just about to rescue a little girl from an abusive and extortionist inn keeper and restore her to her mother. But he can't let an innocent man suffer in his place, so he turns himself in and is sent to prison for life, but soon escapes and rescues the girl, Cosette, after all. He cannot restore Cosette to her mother, who is now dead, so he raises her as his own daughter, and loves for the first time in his life. But Cosette grows up and falls in love with Marius, a young revolutionary. Valjean learns of their love when he accidentally intercepts a letter from Marius saying that he is going to the barricades and expects to be killed. Valjean then has his second crisis. He does not want to give up Cosette, the only person he has ever loved, and he knows that if he does nothing, Marius will be killed and he will not have to give Cosette up. He also knows how wrong he is to want to keep his daughter from growing up, so he goes to the barricade to protect Marius and ends up carrying him, wounded and unconscious, for miles through the sewer to safety. The final crisis occurs when Cosette and Marius are married and Valjean has to decide where to go from there.
As for me, the story revolves around these three great crises. However, there is a certain decline in the story as we go from one to the next. The first crisis is a dilemma fit to vex a saint -- to preserve all he has built at the price of letting an innocent man to to prison for life, or to save the one man and throw all his accomplishments away. The second crisis is no doubt a painful one for Valjean personally, but not a great moral dilemma. Yes, it is wrong to let your daughter's love be killed and do nothing to protect him, and wrong to keep your daughter from growing up. Duh! Valjean's heroic actions to save the life of a man he hates as a rival are worthy of a saint, but there is no vexing moral dilemma at all. And his final decision -- well, let's just say I think he chooses wrong. But that is a different subject for a different post.
For now, I intend to start off with a post on translation, follow with one (or, more likely, several) on the saint as hero, then write about the first and last moral crises (the middle one does not deserve a post). Then, on to the movie. Also, I reserve to right to interrupt to post on significant current events.
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