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I used to be big into cyberpunk, which means I read a lot of Neal Stephenson. The man can't help but dump all of his research into a book, often going on long tangents about some random subject he got deep into and decided to put into whatever he was writing. He gets a lot of flak from that, including from me, for not having an editor chop it down.

Les Miserables reads like the template that he picked this up from. We have Paris here in multiple generations, with the political situation of France deeply woven into the plot. Hugo will suddenly go off on tangents of over a dozen pages about how slang is important and simply part of the dialect, and how it's important that he incorporates it into his book. Or another dozen pages of how the Paris sewer system came to be in the state it was before going into a few chapters that take place in the sewers.

It's all correct, if maybe a bit repetitious for a lot of savvy readers going in. It's a 1300 page doorstopper of a novel, and while I can imagine how you could abridge it to preserve the plot, I can't imagine how you can abridge it while preserving the feel of Les Miserables. The book is very up front about it being more than just a novel, but also in large part a political tract.

I don't think I would have enjoyed this half as much as I did without studying the French Revolution first, as well as later issues like the July monarchy or the commune. If you love 19th century France as a setting, Les Miserables delivers- I have no idea how anyone would get through it without that background, however.