The First or Second Greatest Novel Ever Written

So I finished Les Miserables a few days ago, and since I don't really know anyone else who's read the whole thing, I figure I'll blog about it. Oh blog, you're the only one who understands me...

I say it's the first or second best novel because it's in the running with Anna Karenina. I don't believe that criteria have been invented yet that can prove the superiority of one of these phenomenal books over the other. They will fight it out like two of the gods of yore in the hieghts of my imagination, a victory not given or won by human hands. That said, on to Les Miserables itself.

This book thrives upon its characters. The plotting is superb, but the characters are simply unparalleled. Absolutely brilliant. It is amazing that Hugo can create characters that are at once so believable and so extraordinary. Anyone reading the struggles of Jean Valjean can feel his anguish, and his division of mind, though they will probably never be tempted or tortured in any of the ways that he was. He is a role model in the truest sense, since we can not only relate to his struggles, but aspire to his consistent dedication to righteousness. He is not a character who is simply good because he is good; he does not act out of his nature, but rather continually fights between what is in his self-interest and what is right, and chooses the right because he has been down the dark road of the criminal, but has also been shown the path of grace. His conscience wavers between two aspects of his past: on the one hand the the animal instinct and ruthless self-preservation that he learned in the prisons, and the one beautiful act of mercy that simultaneously rescued him from falling back into that life and
established him for a new one. He takes the strength and fearlessness of his former days and applies them to his reformation. The fearlessness is only partial, however. He does not fear people or pain, but the life of the prisons and the person that that life caused him to become. He fears most of all the loss of Cosette's love, which transformed his life. He is constantly tortured by the knowledge of the past and the uncertainty of the future, yet he always chooses what is right. For this reason he has more to teach than the many other one dimensional good characters. He represents both the light and the dark in humanity, yet he always emerges in the light, following God and the bishop ingrace and mercy to those who may or may not deserve it and taking the consequences upon himself.

Jean Valjean is a character of incredible depth, and he is only one of many in Les Miserables. Javert, Marius, Enjolras, Thenardier, Guillenormand; even the supporting cast are far more that caricatures. Hugo will take pages if necessary to describe in detail even the most minor characters, like Tholomyes and Boulatreille. In fact the only character I really didn't like was the adult Cosette. She was the only one that seemed insubstantial, as if she was purposefully kept that way to be an ideal woman: pretty, charming, and vapid. My, how the ideal woman has changed in the past 150 years. I couldn't help but think as I was reading the book how much I wouldn't like to marry Cosette.

I sometimes refer to Les Mis as the story of a man whose life brings him in contact with a number of long essays. Victor Hugo is not afraid to wax philosophic for pages at a time. Sixty pages on the life and habits of the good bishop, seventy on the battle of Waterloo, fifty on French convents, twenty on the glory of feces and the bizarre history of the Parisian sewers, not counting dozens of three or four page asides on whatever came up. The unifying theme of many of these can be summed up in a single word: progress. The nineteenth century was a time of unbridled optimism in the human race, and Hugo was no exception. Soon the evils of the world would pass away: government would be juxt and benevolent, poverty would cease to exist, and war would disappear from the Earth. One page actually made me laugh out loud, when he stated that the twentieth century would not know war. Not exactly a stellar prediction. Reading this optimism from the 19th century has led me to better understand the brutal pessimism of the twentieth. Faced with the realities of life in the twentieth century after the bold predictions of the nineteenth forced people to face the dark side of humanity: its depth and its pervasive inevitability. Improvements in science and technology will never bring the end of famine or war. Those are the result of something that never changes: the moral composition of the human race.

Les Mis is a brilliant book, whose characters and main theme transcend time and space, though often its peripheral ideas do not. You should read it. Seriously, it's really good.