internet style reading<\/a>, that breezy habit of skimming along and skipping from one small block of text to another in accord with our impatient attention spans.\u00a0 Hugo\u2019s novel goes slowly and relentlessly, like a glacier.\u00a0 His style is exhaustive, describing everything in the greatest depth.\u00a0 What took five minutes in the movie version\u2013the Bishop\u2019s dramatic act of grace to Jean Valjean\u2013takes around a dozen chapters, as Hugo fills in completely the character of the Bishop, his backstory, his struggles with the Revolution, and the roots of his kindness.\u00a0 Hugo gives us a blow-by-blow description of the Battle of Waterloo just to establish that a minor character robbed the bodies of the dead.\u00a0 The effect of all of this, though, is to totally immerse the reader in the story.<\/p>\nThe novel is about a man, Jean Valjean, who was convicted for stealing a loaf of bread and who spent years chained to the oars of a galley, a punishment that turned him into a hardened criminal.\u00a0 After his release, he stole again\u2013from a child, no less\u2013which would have sent him back to the galleys for life.\u00a0\u00a0 But a Bishop shows him inexplicable grace, which moves him so much that he is converted and transformed, resolving to devote his life to showing similar grace to others.\u00a0 In the meantime, he is hunted by an obsessive police officer named Javert.\u00a0 The movie version gives just the broadest outline of what happens, there being many more incidents in the novel.\u00a0 Valjean makes a fortune in the nascent industrial revolution and throws it away, taking on new identities and living on the run as Javert keeps tracking him down.\u00a0 In the meantime, his fate becomes entangled with two women whom he rescues and devotes his life to helping, the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette.\u00a0 We follow Valjean to a new generation, as Cosette falls in love with a young man with his own complex story who gets caught up in one of the other French revolutions that followed the big one of 1789.<\/p>\n
A characteristic of 19th century novels, found for example in Dickens, is the \u201cintrusive narrator.\u201d\u00a0 The storyteller\u2013in this case, Hugo\u2013is constantly commenting upon the action and the characters that he is describing, launching into long digressions and philosophical reflections.\u00a0 Hemingway pretty much killed that convention in favor of direct unmediated narration, so modern readers aren\u2019t used to that.\u00a0 But I found Hugo\u2019s meditations quite intriguing.\u00a0\u00a0 He was definitely a revolutionary, praising the French uprising and its values of equality, liberty, and fraternity.\u00a0 He was also a Bonapartist, lauding Napoleon for casting down the feudal system and social oppression throughout Europe.\u00a0 Hugo believed in Progress.\u00a0 (There is a poignant, utterly ironic, passage in which Hugo looks fondly ahead to the 20th century, where, he thought, war and oppression would finally be done away with.)\u00a0 But Hugo, unlike other revolutionaries, believed in God.\u00a0 He thought that the new social ideas must be grounded in a transcendent morality and in spiritual reality.\u00a0 He was probably not completely orthodox in his theology.\u00a0 But his main character, Jean Valjean, was\u2013responding to the Gospel, praying to Christ, going to Church, loving and serving his neighbors\u2013and Hugo honors sanctity wherever he finds it.<\/p>\n
What is striking about the book is the sense of goodness that it evokes.\u00a0 When I read for pleasure, I typically fill my imagination with murders (from murder mysteries), organized slaughter (from military histories), and various kinds of darkness, cynicism, and satire (from contemporary fiction).\u00a0 Here, though, the author was making me feel the full range of compassion.\u00a0 Not just by showing people in wretched conditions but by giving me a sense of knowing and understanding them.\u00a0 The title does not just mean \u201cthe miserable,\u201d a word in English that just refers to suffering.\u00a0 The root of the French-derived word comes from the term for \u201cmercy.\u201d\u00a0 The word means something like \u201cthe ones who need mercy.\u201d\u00a0 That would apply to all of us.\u00a0 And a good book can give us practice in realizing that.<\/p>\n
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