Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo
translated by Norman Denny

Plot and character discussion; comparison with play

[Everything I say in this page has the capacity to spoil a plot for those who have not both read the book and seen the musical.  The comparisons won’t make much sense either.]

You’ve been warned; please at least read the book before reading this page.

It does not continue to do so, due to the fact that, to track the book at all closely, the play would have to run at least a work-week.  The scene in the book that I think should have been included in the play is when Javert truly believes he has wrongly suspected the mayor of being Valjean and tenders his resignation.  In the play I saw, it presented the capture of ‘Valjean’ as nearly a trap set by Javert, certainly as something Javert seized upon as a golden opportunity to expose the mayor.

I think the novel is exactly what literature should be: full of more coincidences than can happen in real life so that many tales, a broad picture, can be told   I’m thinking of such things as Eponine, Gavroche, and the two boys all being Thernadiers; the Thernadier parents’ connection to Marius’ father and Cosette and hence Valjean.  The connections are too thick for me to but begin to name them.  I love that.

It also has action; with properly selected parts it could make a great movie.  Valjean is a nearly superhuman hero.  His attempted flight from the thugs in Thernadier’s apartment, his self-inflicted pain, and his escape from under Javert’s nose make that scene as much fun as any I’ve read or seen.

Cosette and Eponine

In the play I rather preferred the character of Eponine to that of Cosette.  When Eponine is introduced in the book, negatively, I thought the play must have badly misrepresented her.  Not so.  By the end of the book I again preferred Eponine, the secondary character, to Cosette, the .  Eponine, on several occasions, Cosette could have grown up to be a jellyfish, albeit one that people found very pretty and devoted themselves to, and fulfilled her role in the plot just as well.

I thought in the play Eponine got to hook up with one of the revolutionaries.  I like her getting over Marius like that – after learning from her love for him what she is capable of – rather more than her dying for him, although that is one hell of a scene.

One neat scene I don’t think was at the play is Valjean shooting down the matress (to save the barricade from grapeshot) and shooting the helmets off, but not killing, soldiers coming to spy into the barricade (page 1020).  In general, the superhuman character of Valjean did not come through as well in the play as the book; but to be fair only a movie could do justice to him carrying Marius through sewer muck up to his face.

Going back to not liking Cosette much by the end of the book, she pretty much let Jean Valjean die by letting him leave her life, and I don’t think Hugo should have let that happen.  I’m always disagreeing with major artistic decisions by great writers.