The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventures of Les Misérables David Bellos

RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables by David Bellos Particular Books £16.99

I should come clean at once and confess that like Henry James confronted with

Sons and Lovers, I have to date only ‘trifled with the exordia’ of Les

Misérables. I’ve seen the musical – twice, indeed – and much enjoyed it, but the literary original has so far repelled me. I’ve picked it up and flicked through it several times, but on each occasion I’ve been daunted by its length (1,232 pages in Penguin Classics) and an impression (confirmed by his grandiloquent poetry) that its author, Victor Hugo, was what the Scots would call a blowhard – a pontificating rhetorician, with scant sense of humour and a general tendency to bang on.

So I imagine that I am squarely the sort of reader targeted by the eminent Princeton academic David Bellos for his vastly entertaining and richly informed introduction to the novel, marred only by a meaninglessly hyperbolic title that sets the bar unhelpfully high.

Spanning the first two decades of postNapoleonic France but written in two tranches between 1845 and 1861, Les

Misérables is divided into five parts and (fortuitously, Bellos believes) 365 chapters. As extensively researched as

War and Peace and Middlemarch, two other near-contemporary contenders for that vacuous ‘novel of the century’ accolade, it is threaded round the gripping yarn of Jean Valjean, a tough peasant brutally imprisoned for petty theft who benefits on his release from a priest’s pure act of kindness and consequently decides that he must live a better life.

Around his tale is painted a broad panorama of the lower depths of French society – ‘ misérable’ being best translated as ‘the outcast’ or ‘downtrodden’ – embracing not only Valjean’s pursuit by the vindictive detective Javert but also the travails of the fallen Fantine and her illegitimate daughter Cosette, later adopted by Valjean and beloved of Marius, a youthful hero of the revolutionary barricades of 1832.

At the novel’s moral core lie both Hugo’s genuine outrage at what we now call the poverty trap and Valjean’s heroic determination to take the nobler course despite circumstances that militate against him. Bellos emphasises that neither doctrinaire socialism nor Christianity informs this: Valjean is not a saint or a martyr but ‘a model of a new man’, whose altruistic actions speak louder than his relatively few words, embodying the virtues of that enlightened and democratic republic of which Hugo hopefully dreamed.

Yet Valjean is absent from much of a novel which is massively digressive and intricately tentacular. Bellos explores its nooks and crannies with tremendous scholarly panache, giving wondrous glosses on the possible meaning of otherwise unrecorded words such as

zinzeliere and gargoine, the difference between a sou and a centime, the iconography of the colour red, and the grading of wheeled transport from

carrosse to cabriolet, as well as providing weightier disquisitions on the Battle of Waterloo and the July monarchy.

Just as absorbing is his meticulous account of the novel’s complex palaeography and publishing history. Sold in the first instance for a sum equivalent today to at least £3 million, it was released in 1862 in five instalments over three months, having been publicised by an unprecedented campaign of hype, embargo and fly-posting. The public duly lapped it up in their hordes, but more refined tastes were sceptical: a jealous Flaubert was contemptuous of something he felt (unjustly) was written for ‘catholico-socialist shitheads’ while Dumas compared Hugo’s opulent prose, with its adjectivally loaded perorations and forests of sub-clauses, to ‘wading through mud.’

Fascinating and tantalising as all this is, the regrettable thing is that I remain reluctant to embark on Les Misérables. This may partly be because my French isn’t quite up to either its arcane vocabulary of more than 20,000 words or its fustian grammar, and it sounds as though the translations are mangled, truncated or plain inadequate (a complete text in English wasn’t available until 2008).

Beyond that, my problem is also that ‘the novel of the century’ is competing with the free life of War and Peace, the quiet humanity of Middlemarch, the comic and poetic intensity of Bleak House and the sheer clarity of Madame

Bovary. Les Misérables, I suspect, hectors and bludgeons through fire and brimstone – and that’s something that I don’t warm to in fiction.