Scaling the Barricades Brennan will play feisty Gavroche, a street urchin who inhabits the seedy streets of Paris in 1832. In the operatic drama that unfolds, little Gavroche, who boasts that he runs Paris, will expose a police spy, and die a revolutionary hero s death on the barricades of freedom. The often tragic lives of the people around Valjean are set against a backdrop of socio-economic deprivation, and the French landscape oozes with characters. Any attempt to even summarize them invites run-on sentences. The book runs over 1000 pages, including descriptions of a world of the gamin of Paris, a world in need of light.
Light makes whole.
Valjean s nemesis is the driven and rigid Police Inspector Javert, who hunts the ex-con like an animal. Javert is unable to acknowledge that humanity leaves room for change, forgiveness, and error. There is luckless Fantine, whose daughter, Cosette, is taken in, first by dastardly low-life Thenadier, the scurvy Innkeeper, and his brash wife, then by Valjean, who intends to deliver her to a better life. Cosette, as Valjean dies and joins the spirits of those who have fought the good fight. Valjean, we feel, has the power to move forward, pulling the unwilling, the backward, the mired with him, to that better place.