Adaptations of Les Misérables are always a roaring success. But what's the original book like? Full of implausible scenes but wonderful, says Arabella Byrne
I love Lez Miz. Unashamedly and unreservedly even if it might be in extremely bad taste.
Victor Hugo’s barnstorming tale of redemption and conversion, underwritten by a series of bewildering coincidences, never fails to inspire: child poverty, grave-diggers at Waterloo, bald prostitutes, prisons and even a love story, courtesy of dishy old Marius, to finish off.
Known to Anglophone audiences less as Hugo’s 1862 novel than the Lloyd Webber musical, Lez Miz occupies a curious space in national consciousness as a feelgood singalong romp, with a bit of poverty and religion thrown in for good measure.
This is nothing new. Hugo’s literary peers thought it the equivalent of a Marian Keyes novel, Lamartine describing it as 'l’epopée de la canaille' or the 'epic of the riff-raff'. It didn’t fare much better with a bit of dust on the flyleaf either; both Gide and Sartre could hardly hide their disdain for what they considered to be the ramblings of a sentimental old mystic who rotted away in Jersey conducting seances and weeping over his dead daughter.
This history of contempt is, in some ways, justifiable. Hugo stretches the reader’s credence to the point of gullibility: Valjean galloping to Arras to denounce himself lest someone else should be convicted for the sins in his name, prisoner 24601 scaling the roofs of Paris like some kind of 19th-century Spiderman, and Javert chasing him through the sewers of Paris to exact his revenge, to name but a few instances.
But the marvel of Hugo’s epic is that, once immersed in the narrative - typically in bed in the small hours - not only are we swept along by it, but we cease to care whether any of it makes sense or not. Realism be damned.
As that great critic of the French literary establishment Anne Uberfeld put it, 'I caught myself seated on my bed, at four in the morning, holding tightly to my book and weeping openly – something I am not particularly in the habit of doing.'
We (even those of us who profess to know better) must all acknowledge deep down that Hugo’s epic has a peculiar effect: sentimentality fused with a naïve belief in the triumph of good over evil.
I wonder whether Hugo was all too aware of the effect he might have on his readers; whether he was in on the joke or not. I suspect he was. By presenting us with an array of characters so exaggerated in their emblematic functionality as to be cartoon-like – that swine of an innkeeper Thénardier in particular – and then watching as his audience becomes completely enrapt by them, Hugo is having a good laugh at us rather than the other way around.
Contrary to the popular belief that Les Misérables is an important chapter in the burgeoning genre of 19th-century realism, it’s anything but. Lez Miz is such an eye-poppingly brilliant parody of human nature and its degradations that we all weep and pore over in complete seriousness the moment Fantine gets her teeth pulled out.
I’m as guilty as the next person. But, instead of mocking old greybeard Hugo, I’ll accept that I fell into the sentimentality trap-door all by myself.
