Hang on, Javert was NOT a ruined rich kid...

Well, there goes a neat set-up for a blog post. I was planning to muse on the ever-popular excuse of adapters who mess around with their material - namely that they are staying true to the "spirit of the original". Then I was going to go on by comparing the French/German TV adaptation of Les Misérables with Gérard Depardieu (which I'm currently rewatching) and Steven Moffat's and Mark Gatiss's modern-day take on Arthus Conan Doyle's detective in Sherlock. Conclusion: yes, there is actually such a thing as "the spirit of the original", and sometimes free adaptations are closer to it than the superficially more faithful ones who nevertheless get important things wrong.

I'm going to have to backtrack on this idea, though, because the adaptation of Les Misérables gets better later on, and I can no longer accuse it of not understanding Hugo's characters at all. There are some things that are strange about it, though, and I might as well gripe about them a bit. I'll leave Sherlock - and the question of whether it really does capture some of the essence of the Holmes stories, or if it just so bloody good it doesn't matter either way - for another day.

There were many things that bothered me about the Les Misérables adaptation now I've read the unabridged version of the novel. For one thing, there is very little of Hugo's writing in it (at first I would have said "none at all"). This is not so uncommon in adaptations, perhaps - you could say the same thing about Andrew Davies's Dickens adaptations, good as they are - but Hugo happens to be very good at the kind of dialogue that would have translated seamlessly into a TV script. He was a dramatist as well as a novel writer after all. However, the scriptwriter follows the classic teacher injunction to "tell the story in your own words". It's not a bad script at all, but often I found myself wondering what was wrong with the original.

Then, there are the small changes in the characterisation that are a bit puzzling, though I can live with them well enough. Sister Simplice, the nun who always tells the truth, turns out to be something of a babe with a not-so-secret-crush on Monsieur Madeleine alias Jean Valjean. The icy Enjolras is, in this version, a jolly, forgiving sort of fellow, more like Courfeyrac in the novel. Toussaint, the stuttering female servant, becomes a mute male servant. More seriously, Jean Valjean himself is somehow Depardieu-ised. Jean Valjean in the book did demand that the women who worked in his factory led chaste lives, whereas Depardieu's earthy, jovial mayor is prepared even to let former prostitutes work for him and doesn't care a button about propriety. Fantine's dismissal is all down to the forewoman of the factory, who gets a good hiding from Jean Valjean later. One of the points of Fantine's story, though, is how even good men like Jean Valjean/Monsieur Madeleine can fail in mercifulness for reasons they consider to be virtuous. Fantine's accusations are a useful lesson to Jean Valjean in his struggle to become an (even) better person.

But the biggest problem is Javert. John Malkovich's nervy, softly-spoken policeman who swishes about in a slightly kinky-looking leathery coat is an interesting villain in his way, but he bears little resemblance to the tough, confident man's-man of the novel. They have even changed his back story. Malkovich-Javert's motives are by no means paltry - his rich land-owning father was ruined by a swindler - but it can't beat the fabulousness of the original back story, which even the musical found space for in the memorable lines: "I was born inside a gaol/I was born with scum like you/I am from the gutter too".

One villain the TV series does get, though, is Thénardier. Once you've got used to the fact that the Thénardiers are a great deal hotter than you'd have imagined from the novel - I've always thought that they overdo Madame Thénardier's grotesqueness in the musical, but I can't quite see her as looking like Veronica Ferres either - you have to admit that they follow the novel closely character-wise in every other way. They are just as mean, greedy, envious and downright vile as they should be. Christian Clavier - who was such a good Napoleon - plays the emperor's very opposite with evident relish. Éponine, too, is far from the sanitised version of the musical: she's a chip off the old block, all right.

Given the disaster the Thénardiers are in the musical, it is good to see that they are correctly handled in one adaptation at least. But a Les Mis without a convincing Javert cannot be said to be a whole-hearted success.