CONTRIBUTOR BOOK REVIEW: Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo
Modern Library; New edition (October 8, 2002)

This story is as impressive and gothic as the building whose name it bears: a soaring classic tragedy not to be missed. Hugo is an author who can craft a story about the heart and soul of humanity, and while this one does not quite reach the heights that Les Miserables, no careful reader will leave it untouched.

Hugo’s primary strength, in the tradition of Jane Austen, is his characters. They are all full bodied people, internally consistent, yet capable of surprising one. Esmeralda, the gypsy girl, is a prime example of this. She is tender and compassionate, and yet has all the fluctuating passions and selfishness of an untutored teenage girl. Unlike many of Dickens’s unbelievably angelic heroines, wisdom and foolishness are both equally present in her, strength and weakness combined in the right proportions.

This work is not as powerful as Les Miserables simply because its theme is not as powerful. Les Miserables’s theme is grace and justice. In Hunchback, Hugo tackles the theme of idolatrous love by taking the most cherished of human loves, the love between a man and woman and the love between parent and child, and shows how they all can be twisted into a self-love that always results in the destruction of the self and often the destruction of the object of the love. He gives us a bereaved mother whose obsessive grief turns her love to hate, and a man who allows unvarnished lust under the name of love to lead him unwavering to damnation. Hugo skillfully juxtaposes these and other more subtle examples with striking examples of self-love, selfishness in all its degrees, to show that when love has fallen, it is indistinguishable from selfishness, and even from hate. Indeed, as portrayed in Hunchback, pure selfishness does not have nearly the same destructive power as twisted love. Readers of C.S. Lewis will find strong parallels between Hunchback and Lewis’s The Great Divorce and The Four Loves.

The book still has all of Hugo’s stylistic quirks that may make it tiresome to the modern reader. In particular, his habit of interrupting the story with essays on tangential topics can be tedious, and a reader may be forgiven for skimming or skipping over the chapters on the history of Paris, the history of architecture, and the interplay of the arts (although, once again, Hunchback does not attain the same, uh, level as Les Miserables; I doubt that any tangent in history can match Hugo’s detailed diatribe on the Parisian sewer system). Not that these are necessarily worthless in themselves, but they do drag down the story. In addition, there are some parts of the story that seem to be leading somewhere, notably that of alchemy, which never intercept the main plot and are not concluded, giving the book a slight unfinished feel. Perhaps Hugo intended them merely to add to the atmosphere of the story, which they do, but he develops them too much to leave them hanging as he does.

Regardless of these quibbles, it is still a work of great depth and power. Powerful because its theme calls on the reader to look into himself, and question the motivation behind his own loves. Hugo paints his characters so skillfully, laying bare their thoughts and motivations, that one can see fragments of oneself in them. The reader is offered through their tragedy a light into his own heart and a chance to root out a little more darkness.

Reviewed by: W.C. Long
W.C. Long spent his childhood in Botswana, handling snakes and scorpions with abandon. He is currently teaching his daughter the same pastimes on the Virginia coast.