So I have a buddy in Med-School right now, a certain Elliot Walters, who couple years ago read The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo's love-letter to the Channel Islands that housed his exile during the reign of Napoleon III. It is the tale of an ostracized young fisherman who salvages a steam-boat engine against impossible odds for the barest chance of love from a beautiful woman. Dr. Walters asked what I thought of the novel. You know, one of the really irritating things about being an English major and teacher is that no matter how many books you read, there are, statistically-speaking, guaranteed-classics that you still hasn't gotten to that other people have. Hence, you can out-read almost everyone you know, you can read the Complete Shakespeare and War and Peace and so forth, but folks are still gonna gleefully dance around you when they learn they've read Anna Karenina and you haven't (yet). It's a curse, is what it is.
But, giving credit where credit's due, Elliot didn't gleefully dance around me when he found I hadn't read Toilers of the Sea. He merely made me promise to read it one day, and if I did to let him know what I thought of it. It was a very casual promise, one I'd be surprised if he even remembers--nevertheless, a promise is a promise, and I like to be considered an honest man.
So anyways, yeah, Toilers of the Sea. Just barely finished it. I'll start by saying it's very Hugo-esque, what with all those long, over-wrought descriptions and his obsession with historical context. It seems that Hugo's historical-meditations grew stronger over the course of his career; his early novel Hunchback of Notre Dame has two solid chapters describing 15th-century Paris and the Notre Dame cathedral--but you can safely skip those two chapters and still enjoy the main Quasimodo/Esmeralda narrative.
Les Miserables, written much later, feels like two separate books combined into one--50% a long form meditation on the significance and fall-out of the French Revolution, and the other 50% Jean Valjean's story. But, there are clear transitions from the one book to the other, so you can likewise easily buy abridged versions of Les Miserables that preserve in tact only the Jean Valjean narrative.
I don't think the same can be said for Toilers of the Sea, which was written even later than Les Mis. Here, the long-form historical meditations seem to take up the majority of the text, and are so interwoven into the main narrative that I'm not sure one even can abridge it into a more compact form--at least, not do so and still have it be Hugo's Toilers of the Sea.
But what struck me while reading Toilers wasn't that Hugo had gotten so much more relentlessly contemplative in his old age and exile, but rather that Hugo hadn't been so all along. You see, it's only outside of France that Hugo's best known as a novelist; within France (like Pasternak in Russia), Hugo's reputation is that of a poet.
Poetry simply has a different set of genre-expectations; whereas in novels one is expected to continually push forward a gripping plot, in poetry one is supposed to linger, wax contemplative, meditate deeply upon a single subject. At least, so the Romantic poets were supposed to do--Keats, Wordsworth, Goethe, etc--and Hugo was certainly ranked among the 19th-Century Romantics. Hugo's first allegiance is to poetry I suspect, and it is his poetic (not his novelist) tendencies that dominate Toilers, such that it takes a solid half of the novel to set up the salvage operation that fulfills the actual narrative.
Yet strangely...I didn't mind the meditative digressions nearly as much in Toilers as I did in Notre Dame or Les Mis. Whereas I mostly just tolerated the tangents in the former two, the digressions of the latter feel integral towards capturing the atmosphere and charm of the Channel Islands. Toilers actually made me want to visit this archipelago and experience the place first hand for myself. (The book also reminded me how dearly I miss the ocean).
The protagonist Gilliatt fits in comfortably Hugo's Christ-type heroes. Like Quasimodo and Jean Valjean before him, Gilliatt "is a root out of dry ground," "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," in whom "there is no beauty that we should desire him;" he sacrifices his own comfort and happiness in order to redeem the ungrateful and undeserving; he descends into metaphoric hells of awful physical pain and degradation; he defeats the devil (perhaps a little too on-the-nose as he fights a literal "Devilfish"); he experiences his passions ("passion" shares with "patience" the same Latin root in "Patos," meaning literally, "to suffer"); and finally, after successfully accomplishing the redemption, he dies that others may be reconciled, at-one, and happy.
The closest analogue I could think of to Toilers is probably Melville's Moby Dick, another deeply-meditative maritime-novel with a slow-simmering plot and long contemplations about man's solitude in the Universe. Toiler's ending, however, put me more in a mind of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, another story wherein a fisherman accomplishes an impossible task that is both a victory and a failure. Santiago does in fact catch the giant Marlin that dragged him out to sea, only to see it eaten by sharks on the way back; Gilliatt likewise salvages in tact the steam-engines of a ship-wreck from a rocky reef, in spite of hurricanes, low supplies, and man-eating octopuses. But at least Santiago got to dream of the Lions again; Gilliatt only watches the girl of his dreams sail away married with the Priest he once saved, all while he allows the sea he'd resisted for so long to slowly drown him at last.
Though certainly no page-turner (Victor Hugo never is), I still found Toilers of the Sea to be a haunting, gorgeous, dream of a novel. I started it mainly out of a vague sense of duty and loyalty, but by the end it had become one of my new favorite books. I'm glad Elliott made me promise to read it, even if he did so only on a lark. I hope to one day visit the island of Guernsey myself, perhaps find out if there really is a Gild-Holm-'Ur along its rocky shores, and watch the tide turn in and submerge itself over Gilliatt's final resting place.
