More Grand than Heaven

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.”