When I first heard it had been turned into a musical I was sceptical about how they could possibly fit such an immensely long and meandering novel into three hours. On one level they don’t. The essentials are there, albeit slightly altered as is the way with dramatisations. Madame Thénardier, for instance, was dead by the time of the 1832 events on which the second half of the musical centres, and the earlier vicissitudes of Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, and a host of other characters are much abbreviated. There are also many characters that just don’t appear in the film and stage versions.
In the novel Hugo treats us to long discussions, theological, philosophical and political. We are even given about a hundred pages on the Battle of Waterloo – what Napoleon was thinking, what Wellington was thinking, what some of the other players were thinking. Even later on, when Jean Valjean carries the unconscious Marius through the sewers, there are thousands of words about the history of the Paris sewers, with comparisons to those of London for good measure. In exile in the Channel Islands when he wrote the novel, Hugo sometimes takes the time to relay amusing little snippets he has read in The Times. On several occasions Jean Valjean also has plans to escape to England, but events always intervene.
Although much of the novel could easily be scrapped without injury to the plot, its length does at least help Hugo flesh out the characters in a way that allows readers to understand their (and Hugo’s) thinking. On stage the characters are largely one-dimensional but the book paints a totally different picture, where motives are mixed, where noble revolutionaries can sometimes also be spoiled brats with their own agendas (in that respect times have not changed). The very man who abandoned Fantine was also a verbose pub revolutionary dazzled by his own purity of purpose. The establishment and Church come in for criticism, yet they include among their number well-meaning and sometimes saintly figures, such as the kindly bishop who protects Jean Valjean, and the nuns who run the hospital Jean Valjean set up in his wealthy manufacturing period. Louis Philippe, the king at the time of the 1832 disturbances, is portrayed in a relatively good light, someone who wanted the best for everyone but could not reconcile the irreconcilable. Marius’s very reactionary grandfather turns out not to be quite such a bad old cove in the end, and even Javert, that seemingly heartless upholder of the law, is explained as someone who lacks imagination but whose sense of duty is utterly sincere.
Hugo was a great admirer of Dickens, which may not have been an entirely good thing as his more Dickensian-style characters are just too grotesque to be plausible. The Thénardiers have no redeeming features and just when you think they couldn’t get any worse, they do. And like Dickens, his story is stuffed with ludicrous coincidences. One or two might be possible, but this is taking liberties. Javert constantly has occasion to run into Jean Valjean in whichever part of France he happens to be, as does Thénardier. The two smaller abandoned boys who are looked after by the slightly older abandoned boy, Gavroche, are actually his brothers (though none of them know that) and all three of them are the offspring of the Thénardiers.
Yet for all that the novel is rightly a classic and, coincidences and some unlikely characters aside, Hugo avoids a few pitfalls evident in some modern novels. Many Catholics-turned-freethinkers today would probably be reluctant to acknowledge the good as well as the bad in the religion they had abandoned, and his insights into the ambiguous workings of the idealist mind may have been ahead of their time.