Voilà Jean

It seems as though I've always known the story. Before I first read Victor Hugo's story in my early teens, there was a classic comic - then a BBC Sunday evening serial. Perhaps my mother told me the tale - it was certainly one of her favourites. Cosette, Marius, Fantine, the Thenardiers and, above all, Javert and Jean Valjean weren't just characters in a book - they were part of the mythic structure by which I understood the world.

These days, fewer people read Les Misérables. "It's too long," someone told me last night." "I was put off by the musical," another commented. "I've read The Hunchback of Notre Dame," was another defence, as if one Hugo novel could stand for all the rest. Mind you, I haven't read much by Hugo. I'd like to find time for the late novels L'Homme qui Rit (The Man who Laughs) and Quatre-vingt Treize (1793). But before I do that, I have to finish Les Misérables and I'm still only 260 pages in. There are about 1200 to go so I'll be busy reading over Christmas.

Last time I tried to re-read Les Misérables, I picked up my old English-language version. It's a bulky tome from Collins, with mock-leather binding and pages as thin as any Bible's. I thought it the height of elegance when I was 13. A few years ago, I found the prose style dull and was bored by Hugo's sententious moralising. I put it down again.

This summer, in one of the French bookshops at South Kensington, I picked it up again - perhaps in an abridged edition - and the magic returned. I hesitated, thought I might buy a copy, then left the shop. I was having a small economy drive and wasn't convinced I'd get through more than a chapter. Besides, the exchange rate means that French books are no longer as cheap as they were. I thought I'd get over it. But throughout the autumn I found myself looking for copies in English bookshops and secondhand shops, checking the prices on-line and wondering if perhaps, for Christmas, for my birthday, I should buy myself a copy.

I didn't expect to find the three-volume paperback edition in the Canterbury Oxfam shop. I checked carefully to ensure it was a complete text, looked at the price (£4.99) and reflected that, even if I didn't read it, Oxfam could do with my money. Most of my long journey home was consumed with work but on the tube, on the bus, when waiting at stations, I started to read ... and I found it hard to stop. Even now I don't want to blog about Les Misérables - I want to read it, and I'm tired from reading it last night when I should have been catching up on sleep.

The first eighty or so pages dragged slightly - they focus on the good bishop who changes Jean Valjean's life. Maybe I needed to read myself into the book or just to get used to Hugo in French. Once Jean Valjean arrived, I found myself at risk of missing my stop on the bus. I've even walked along the road while reading - something I haven't done for at least forty years.

Perhaps it's the focus on the poor that commands my attention. I may respect the bishop but I care about Valjean, Fantine and the other "misérables" of the book's title. Reading in French makes me consider what "misérable" means. It's not "unhappy." I've seen the word translated as "wretched." But surely in France where Catholicism and the Latin Mass were so important, there's a connection to the Latin prayer "miserere nobis" - "have mercy upon us." Many of the people in Les Misérables are wretched and unhappy but, above all, they need and deserve mercy.

Hugo's conviction that mercy is a greater human responsibility than truth, justice or any other accepted virtue is startling in today's society. Mercy isn't restricted to the cute or angelic. When Jean Valjean first appears he is compared to a brute and an animal. His grievances about his treatment in jail have placed him outside human society. He's never been a great part of it. He doesn't even have a proper name. Hugo explains that he's inherited the name "Valjean" or "Vlajean" from his father and that it was simply a corruption of "Voilà Jean" - "There's Jean." He's an individual who has been despised all his life and who has learnt to hate in return.

In Les Misérables, Hugo insists that human beings can learn and change - that mercy transforms lives and communities. He was writing against the trend in his own time. Les Misérables was published in 1862, five years before Zola's Thérese Raquin, the first of a string of major novels which proclaimed the belief that humans were controlled by the circumstances of their lives and had no means of escape or power over the events that affected them. I may care about Zola's characters but his view of the world doesn't fit the people I encounter.

The world I live in includes people who are cruel and vindictive like the Thenardiers. I've met plenty of people like Javert who obey laws and rules unthinkingly because they assume the forces of law government always know best - people who assume that the wealth and its trappings are a badge of virtue and respectability. But there are also many people like Jean Valjean and Fantine and even the Bishop - trying to do their best, making mistakes, giving way anger and misjudgement but also capable of enormous love and generosity. These are the flawed, good people who are willing to learn and change. They show mercy to others, even at great cost, because they also need and receive mercy.

It's not a very modern view of the world but I'm rushing back to it. I should be in bed asleep but Jean Valjean is on his way to Arras and I want to know - even though I know already - what happens next.

When the statue moves

There are a few moments in film, opera and drama that always move me to tears. In Casablanca it's the bit where the Nazis are singing round the piano and Victor Laszlo tells the band to play the "Marseillaise". As the customers in Rick's Bar stand to sing and drown out the Nazis, I feel the familiar lump in my throat.

Resistance moves me. So does reconciliation - often the moment when parent and child are reunited. When, at the end of The Railway Children, Roberta finally cries out "Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!" once again I'm moved to tears. The same happens with the less well-known reunion between father and daughter in Shakespeare's Pericles when the father summons up the sea metaphors to express his joy at seeing his sea-born daughter Marina:

"Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness."

There's another kind of reconciliation that affects me at the end of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro when the Count asks the Countess for forgiveness and she, in the most heartbreakingly sweet music of the opera agrees. In the reality of the 18th century, she doesn't have much choice. Beaumarchais' third Figaro play, La Mere Coupable, takes a more cynical view of the characters while Mozart's own music in the final chorus seems to anticipate the greater cynicism of Cosi fan Tutte.

But the betrayal the Countess forgives is nothing to the forgiveness shown by Hermione at the end of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. Hermione cannot regain all that her husband's cruelty took from her. She has lost her small son for ever and has spent sixteen years in isolation, uncertain whether the baby stolen from her has survived. Her husband's guilt and suffering may be clear but he's still far from perfect as his reaction to Perdita and Florizel's romance makes plain. Yet when he stands before what he believes to be the statue of his dead wife, the audience usually holds its breath, willing the miracle that will bring forgiveness and reconciliation. And so, after long stillness, music sounds, the statue moves and the living woman reunited with husband and daughter.

This ideal of forgiveness despite deep wrong runs through many of Shakespeare's plays. In Measure for Measure, the would-be nun Isabella believes her brother has been executed on the orders of Angelo and still, at the pleading of Angelo's new wife, kneels to beg for mercy on his behalf. At least in Measure for Measure, the audience knows that Isabella's brother is still alive - but there is very little to be said in Angelo's favour. The most Isabella can say on his behalf is that he used the law to kill her brother and that he failed in his intention to rape her. When I find myself in tears at this point, it is not because I feel much sympathy for Angelo, or even his new wife who is never quite convincing as a character.

What moves me to tears is the generosity of those who forgive, despite their pain. It's an impossible, even risky act. In Hermione's case, it seems to be brought about by love but Isabella acts on the appeal from a woman who has helped her, sustained by the belief that mercy is better than the fierce justice that kills.

Forgiveness seems a long way from the public mood at present. I went to a school that required me to attend church regularly so I absorbed the words of the General Confession from the Prayer Book: "We have erred and strayed from thy ways, like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their fault, Restore thou them that are penitent ...." This may seem like too much abasement but at least it united members of the congregation in the understanding that they required forgiveness as much as anyone else.

I wouldn't claim that Christians have a good record in offering forgiveness - history shows that many Christians in power have been smug, punitive, violent, racist and vicious. But that sense of the value of forgiveness, which comes from passages in the Gospels rather than the actions of so-called Christians, may have been lost for good. The rhetoric of justice - which is even harder to achieve - seems to have replaced any sense of the beauty of mercy and reconciliation. For me, forgiveness deals with the reality of fallible human people who don't seem able to avoid hurting one another but who are still capable of great love.

Future generations may still be moved by the singing of the "Marseillaise" in Casablanca. Resistance to wrong will still be necessary. Roberta's cry as she realises her father is free will still be potent because his release from prison is a matter of justice and his restoration to his family a vindication of their faith and love.

But what about the works where flawed and unworthy human beings are nonetheless loved and forgiven. Will future audiences have any sense of why those passages from Mozart and Shakespeare move me to tears?