Les Misérables

"First I should say that there are so many incredible works of fiction that engage with issues of moral character. The writings of Dante, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, for instance, would all be great choices as well! I went with Les Misérables because it so vividly illustrates two ideas about character which are central to my thinking. The first is that our characters can change over time. If we struggle with dishonesty, or lust, or pride, we do not have to always struggle. We see this in the case of Jean Valjean. There is a key moment in the book when change in his moral character is set into motion, a moment which also illustrates the second idea, namely that role models can be powerful sources of character change. When Valjean is caught stealing from the bishop and is brought before him by the gendarmes, the bishop does something we rarely see in life. He forgives Valjean. By making up a story for the gendarmes about how he had given Valjean the silver and by chastising Valjean for not taking the candlesticks too which were also supposed to be a gift, the bishop is able to get Valjean released. As I read the book, with this powerful display of forgiveness and compassion, Valjean’s life – and especially his moral character – is transformed. But of even greater importance to me is the impact this scene can have on us the reader. I know that in my own case I was deeply moved by what the bishop did, even though he was a fictional character. I saw something beautiful there, and wanted to have it in my own life too. There has been a lot of research recently on the impact of good role models, and two emotions are thought to play a big role. The first is admiration. I deeply admired the bishop’s act of forgiveness. But that is not enough to effect change in me. After all, I also admired what the US men’s curling team did in winning the Olympic gold medal. But that hasn’t changed my life in any way. Along with my admiration for the bishop came feelings of emulation. I wanted to be more like the bishop, not in every way of course – I have no desire to become a bishop, for instance! – but when it came to matters of compassion and forgiveness. Although I might not have thought about it in those terms, I wanted my character to more closely resemble his character. And I suspect I am not the only reader who has felt that way. “Admiration and emulation work slowly and gradually on our characters over time” Good role models might not act so dramatically or have such an immediate impact on us as the bishop’s forgiveness did on Jean Valjean. But admiration and emulation can also work slowly and gradually on our characters over time."

"I read Les Misérables when I was a kid and then re-read it last summer and, do you know, I am now convinced that it is the greatest novel of all time. Every story in the world is somewhere in there. It’s extremely sentimental, it’s extremely historical and digressive, there are parts of it that are boring as hell – but that’s true of War and Peace and other great novels. Overall, it’s such a compendious, wonderful thing, full of gems. Oh, the description of the Battle of Waterloo, a love story between Marius and Cosette which is absolutely heart-rending, actions of kindness and grace, wonderful chapters on the Paris underworld of the 1820s… There’s a fantastic chapter near the end where Valjean carries Marius through the sewers which is one amazing horror story. It was an event bigger than the launch of Titanic and Avatar put together. Hugo was a European celebrity and he had an enormous fan base in France both for political and literary reasons. He was a hugely popular writer and a great poet. His wife organised the most tremendous publicity launch – advertisements everywhere, posters, placards, all the newspapers featured it. Yes, but he wasn’t there to enjoy it. He was in exile on the island of Guernsey from where he could almost see France on a clear day. And one big dimension of Les Misérables is it’s a novel of nostalgia – he’s trying to reconstruct the Paris of his youth which he didn’t know if he would ever see again. In a sense, he never would because most of it had been rebuilt during the Second Empire by the time he got back. Because he was an opponent of Napoleon III who had seized power in a coup d’état in 1851 and turned what had been a left-wing revolution into a – not vicious – but very authoritarian right-wing regime, and Hugo, who was a leading figure in French politics, objected and the Emperor said ‘Out you go’; many hundreds, thousands, of opposition figures were exiled, imprisoned or executed at that time. Yes. It’s not directly political because it’s set in an earlier period, about 40 years earlier. It contains lots of essays, digressions about the nature of revolution – when is a crowd a mob? and so forth; there’s a kind of retrospective justification for revolt. More broadly, it’s a novel with a liberal left agenda that would become fairly orthodox by the end of the 19th century – calling for more education, a better deal for the working classes, etc. It shaped the view of what is good and right for several generations to come. Well, the main character, Jean Valjean, is completely unbelievable but completely fascinating. Unbelievable in the sense that he’s totally sexless, he’s a former convict from the very dregs of society, and yet is a man of extreme cleverness. He is a novelistic hero. Absolutely wonderful, but credible? No! Well, because it’s so huge and so capacious and contains so many different stories and takes on the world, you can make anything out of Les Misérables – including Broadway’s longest-running musical. The thing is – and the reason I’m so enthusiastic about it – I realise how many other novels come out of it, how much material it’s given not just to French literature but to world literature, English and Russian as well. We often read books without realising that actually Hugo invented this story. A huge undertow of 20th-century literature is attempting to rewrite Les Misérables ."