Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve chosen to season any residual Christmas jollity still hanging around in the New Year with a healthy dose of relentless misery. I’m speaking, of course of, Andrew Davies’ brilliant adaptation of Victor Hugo’s crushingly grim Les Misérables.
So far it’s been a grindingly joyless miracle of latent and actual unhappiness. Children are separated from their parents, the honest are swindled, the good made to suffer and the evil to prosper.
And yet, in all of it, one shining moment of kindness has blazed through the gloom: the scene where Derek Jacobi’s saintly Bishop offers Dominic West’s brutal and brutalised Jean Valjean a shot at redemption: instead of denouncing him to the police for stealing, he gives him two silver candlesticks to add to his hoard and sends him on his way, a potentially wealthy man.
Now, to be frank, few of us have ever been on the run like Jean Valjean. But I think that there have been moments in most of our lives where things have seemed to be slipping away from us; where we have done what we know to be wrong, been judged and found wanting; where we have made a mistake and been left scrabbling to set things right.
The Bible is full of stories of catastrophic failure. King David, guilty of arranging a murder; St Peter, guilty of abandoning his friend; St Paul, guilty of hate crimes.
But in each case, failure isn’t the end of the affair. Christians believe in a God who is all about second chances and all those stories come with the promise of a fresh start, not because it is deserved but because it is a gift. Christians call this ‘grace’. Wrongdoing is balanced by the offer of forgiveness; betrayal is met with trust; despair is turned to hope and instead of being destroyed, lives are transformed.
Which is precisely why Jean Valjean’s story is so universally appealing – because having been given an undeserved second chance he strives to be better: having experienced compassion he becomes compassionate. And compassion in the darkness isn’t just what makes Les Misérables so compelling. It’s what makes life worth living.
The image is a detail from a 17th century English embroidery of the story of David and Bathsheba, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.