Obligatory
statement of embarrassment as to how long it’s been since I posted to this
blog. Great, moving on.
I
adore Les Misérables. As a musical especially,
it is a beautiful story, and I nearly always ugly cry at the finale. Sometimes I forget, however, how very good
the book is, as well. There are reasons
for this, of course: it is a massive book, larger even than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or Outlander, some of the more modern fridge-sized
literature. It took me weeks to finish,
where I normally can knock out a book in five or six days, and that was
including several long passages on the battle of Waterloo or how ships are
built that I flipped past. But it is a
classic for a reason.
“This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the infinite.”
For
those of you who have not read it, nor seen the various plays, musicals, and
movies based on it, the story (much abridged) is this: a young man, Jean
Valjean, steals a loaf of bread in post-revolutionary era France and is
imprisoned. Thanks to harsh criminal law
and his several attempts to escape, he serves nineteen miserable years in
prison. This makes him a hardened, cruel
person, but he experiences a life-changing event when, upon his release, he is
offered incredible kindness by a priest.
Valjean turns his life around, eventually adopting the daughter of an
unmarried woman who dies before she can escape poverty. But throughout his life and Cosette’s growing
up, he is hunted by a policeman named Javert, who refuses to believe that a
thief could ever redeem himself.
As
is often the case, what is important in the story is not what happens but why
it happens and how. Valjean is like a
saint, but there is realism in his desperate struggles with his conscience—one of
the most beautiful and relatable passages is the night and day that Valjean
spends trying to save a man who has been accused in his name. Throughout all that time, though he is moving
to do the right thing, he consistently makes excuses, tries to find a way that
he can escape the confession that he knows he has to make. His anguish makes him very human, and yet he
makes countless sacrifices and proves himself a true hero. Likewise Javert, Valjean’s enemy and foil,
shows a darker realism found in humanity.
He is relentless in the face of justice, even cruel, and yet believes
himself to be in the right. When he is
finally forced to see that he was wrong about Valjean, he cannot comprehend or
accept that truth, and it destroys him.
(I would have mentioned there would be spoilers, but—well, the book has
been in print since 1862, so…)
The
quote above was speaking of God, and there are chapters and
chapters of Christian ideology in this book.
What I found most interesting, however, was not the way the book talks
about God, but the way it talks about humanity.
“There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven. There is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.”
The story is really about the nature of humanity, that which we all have
in common. Its enormous and varied cast
portrays a sampling of human nature. We
see pure, true love in Marius and Cosette, but also love denied and twisted in
Fantine and Eponine. There is selfless
parental love in Valjean for Cosette, and opposing it is Madame Thénardier, who
allows her sons to grow up on the streets.
Valjean and his benefactor, M. Myriel, show true selflessness,
and then there is sly, grasping Thénardier, who always has another plan for his
own gain. Enjolras embodies patriotism
and love of his nation, and he dies senselessly for it, while Marius ends up in
the fight almost by accident and survives it.
Young and old, rich and poor, good and wicked—all appear in the pages of
this text to show a piece of “this infinity which every man bears within him.”
I
could write a dozen posts inspired by this book—on war, love, faith, conscience—and
I might. But what makes this book so
real and so relevant, even now, is what it has to say about who we are. Life may be miserable sometimes, but you can
always find happiness and hope if you reach for the better parts of
yourself. This, after all, is all part
of “the somber march of the human race.”
