Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror in 1793, Victor Hugo's last novel combines striking characters, intense action, and poignant scenes to form another solid work in a master's oeuvre.The novel follows three interlacing story arcs: In the Vendee region of France, a Royalist commander named Marquis de Lantenace rallies the anti-revolution rebels against his great-nephew Gauvain, who has renounced his nobility and is leading the Republican forces. A young widow Michelle Flechard and her three children are caught in the middle of the conflict, while Cimourdain, an agent of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, is tasked with ensuring no mercy is shown to the Royalist rebels.
True to his narrative vision, Hugo creates several complex situations to highlight moral and emotional crises. Of all his novels, these characters are perhaps the most transparently symbolic: Gauvain as pure Christian idealism, Cimourdain as the rigidity of law and logic, Lantenac as the bloody history of old Europe, and Michelle Flechard as France herself - helpless, tossed on the tides of fate, with her future in jeopardy. Yet even with the heavy symbolism here, the humanity of the characters transcends the message. Tears came to my eyes more than once. Hugo really has a talent at orchestrating events to bring about a gut response and illustrate morality and depravity in the flesh.
Since this is Hugo, there are a few historical-poetic-philosophical interludes, but they are interesting for the most part, particularly his epic portrait of the Convention in Paris. Even with the asides, this is one of his leanest and most focused novels, a stirring account of people living in a turbulent time.
Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 moral and emotional crises
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