Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

As any bona fide bookworm will confirm, deciding what to pack for holiday reading is the most painful of First-World dilemmas. This year, the decision was in part made for me, because I was already halfway through Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. And there was no way I wasn’t going to finish it.

As for what came after that – I’ll come on to that.

Les Misérables – Hugo’s masterpiece, which he worked on, on and off, for decades – is one of the longest novels ever written (over 1,300 closely printed pages in the Penguin translation), the epitome of the vast nineteenth-century blockbuster, giving a panoramic view of French society (especially its poorer portions) and culminating in the Paris uprising of 1832. (I won’t attempt to summarize it here – there are plenty of summaries elsewhere. And much better to read it for oneself!)

The superbly constructed plot (this is a real page-turner – even if there are an awful lot of pages to turn) is complex and involved, but part of the reason for the length is Hugo’s (in)famous tendency to launch into long digressions. Hugo was a man of insatiable curiosity and astonishingly broad knowledge, and he doesn’t hold back on wanting to astonish the reader with those qualities. . . Often these thirty- or forty-page “asides” come at climactic moments in the plot. So when the ex-convict hero, Valjean, and the girl he is protecting, Cosette, hide out in a convent, Hugo takes us away from the police pursuit to give us an exhaustive history of the convent, and then (a digression from a digression) to place this history in the context of his own general views on the place of monasticism in European civilization. . . Or towards the end, when Valjean is again on the run and seeking any bolthole, we are treated to an extended and detailed history of the Parisian sewer-system. . .

I was fascinated to read in Robert Tombs’s Introduction to the Penguin edition that these digressions, far from being the products of an undisciplined tendency to ramble, were deliberately inserted at a late stage in the book’s composition: Hugo wanted the form of his novel to reflect actual life – and actual life, as Hugo correctly observed, is messy and liable to go off at tangents: it isn’t “tightly plotted”.

With its scale, its many moments of rhetorical brilliance and imaginative beauty (Hugo was a great poet as well as a great novelist), and (beneath the melodrama and sometimes mawkish sentimentality), its underlying moral passion and seriousness, reading Les Misérables is a hugely impressive and memorable experience. That said, I have profound misgivings about what might be called Hugo’s “philosophy of life” – but unpacking my love-hate relationship with the book will have to await a future blog. . .

Here, in this reader’s diary, I want to focus on what came after, and the light it shed. Because the other book I packed before I set off on holiday was a masterpiece of a completely different kind – Archie Barnes’s Chinese Through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse (2007). This holiday, I’d decided, was going to be the occasion to pick up again, after a break of more than a year, my enchanted, Quixotic project of trying to learn classical Chinese.

To re-enter the world of the great Tang Dynasty (C8-9^th AD) poets straight after reading Les Misérables was a shattering culture-shock, and also a revelation: it was to be translated not just between utterly alien visions of the universe and humanity’s place in it (profoundly European and Christianity-infused on the one hand, Chinese and suffused with Taoism and Buddhism on the other) but between two completely different conceptions of literary art, and of the relationship between text and reader.

As with my love-hate relationship with Hugo, my love-love relationship with the Tang poets will have to await a future blog for fuller exposition (as an enthusiastic amateur, I hasten to add, not an expert). Suffice to say here that coming out of Les Misérables into the world of the Chinese poets was like coming out of a confinement into the fresh air: in part because of the extreme concision and imagistic nature of traditional Chinese writing, it affords wide spaces between the words that the reader is invited to fill with his or her own constructions and imagination.

Picking up Archie Barnes’s book again straight after Les Misérables made me realise in retrospect how much, at every point, Hugo is at such bossy pains to tell the reader exactly what to think and feel. (That’s another reason, apart from the complexity of the plot and the digressions, for the novel’s inordinate length.) Returning to the worlds of Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei, I felt had been released from the claustrophobic confinement of a fetid, crowded room: I could once more breathe and stretch my imagination. . .

Reading is above all an experience: perhaps it helped that this revelation came to me on a Brittany beach, amid vast expanses of rock, sand, sea and sky!