I’m reading Les Misérables for the first time and I really enjoy the way Victor Hugo takes his time telling a story. The battle of Waterloo is discussed at length, and many details of it described, just so that a single scene can be played out at the end of the battle in which a man, left on the battlefield for dead, is come across by chance and saved so that he can later play a part in Hugo’s story.

The scene feels real because of all that has until this point been described: Hugo has described the crush of horses and men that led to the pile of corpses under which the man is buried and so we can vividly imagine the horror of it; the historical significance of the battle has been pressed upon us, lending the scene a kind of ominous weight, the meeting of two men aligning with the fall of Napoleon. In other words: the action is placed into a real context and so it feels all the more real than it might have done.

Was it necessary to go into so many details of the battle before describing this scene? No, but then again nothing in literature is strictly necessary. A work of art has its effect, and there is no denying that if the artist had proceeded differently, the effect would have been different. Hugo might have told his story with the barest bones: we all know the battle of Waterloo happened, and it was on this battlefield that this man was found by this other man, and it was because of this chance occurrence that a connection was formed between them. This would be if all Hugo wanted was to tell the story. But Hugo writes so that his readers can immerse themselves in a world, and given that the book is 1200 or more pages long, they have plenty of time to do that.

Literature is a product of choices on the part of the author, rather than their having some divine insight into the right or the wrong way of doing things. Some will criticise Hugo for being long-winded, while others (like me) are glad that there are and have been souls in the world who see the value in taking their time.

(I’ve been reading Norman Denny’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Denny’s introduction contains an interesting discussion of Hugo’s “extravagance” as a writer due to his being “incapable of leaving anything out”; Denny is one of those who thinks Hugo too long-winded, calling the inclusion in the novel of the detailed account of the battle of Waterloo “indefensible.”)