by TIM PARKS
The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’ by David Bellos
Particular, 307 pp, £20.00, January, ISBN 978 1 84614 470 7
Any reflection on Victor Hugo risks degenerating into a procession of superlatives. Poet, dramatist, novelist, romantic, reactionary, revolutionary, mystic, miser and indefatigable philanderer: without him French literature, French politics of the 19th century are unimaginable. The scope of his ambition, the range of his genius, the vastness of his output, the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the 1500-page novel, and goes on:
Nineteenth-century France … was uncommonly generous to the rest of the world … But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by far. This reconstruction of how this extraordinary novel arose, how it was published, what it means and what it has become is my way of saying thank you to France.
Never abandoning this celebratory tone, The Novel of the Century makes a number of large claims with gusto. The first is that despite being composed over 16 years, from 1845 to 1861, the novel was all intended to be exactly as it is. ‘Everything in a work of art is an act of the will,’ Bellos quotes Hugo. And so ‘every detail and every dimension’ of this 500,000-word novel ‘was designed, calculated and decided by the author’. And calculated to be successful: ‘The unique adventure of Les Misérables as a global cultural resource did not come about by chance … Hugo always intended his great work to speak far beyond the borders of France, and beyond the pages of a book. Most plans to conquer the whole world with a story go awry. Les Misérables is a wonderful exception.’
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