There are bakers and inn-keepers, Corsicans and psychopaths, smugglers and brigands and soldiers, lesbians and paraplegics and harem-slaves… it’s not just so much a cast of characters as a miniature portrait of the world.Īnd above the world, there is God, and/or Satan: The Count of Monte Cristo. The women, too, all seeking different ways of asserting independence (the villainnesses, that is – the real heroines, obviously, delight in childlike obedience…). Beauchamp, the journalist Château-Renaud, last of the old aristocracy Debray, the apparatchik. There is Danglars, prince of the new class of bankers and financial speculators. There is Villefort, the iron man of the law. There is young Monfort, the trivial and high-strung rich dandy.
There is old Monfort, the military man (part of the “nobility of the cannon”, the upwardly-mobile cadre promoted through the wars of Napoleon and his successors). Dumas creates a world his readers would have known intimately – a detailed, Parisian world, that seeks to take in all aspects of the society of his time. But it’s not Dantès taking revenge – it’s the reader. Instead, it’s… well, maybe it is a revenge story. That’s why, for example, it is so little interested in the psychology of the revenant Dantès, who for most of the action of the novel is a masked enigma. It’s an old story, with many imitators.Ĭristo isn’t, in the end, really a revenge tale at all. The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel of revenge, in which a terribly wronged man, finding himself through luck and excellence in a position of power and wealth, decides to gain revenge on those who have wronged him. Let’s start with what the novel is, and isn’t. It is riddled with flaws that undermine its brilliance… but it’s not entirely clear to me which flaws could be improved upon, and which are essential to the novel’s angular, singular nature. At times, I thought it little more than dross. Some books are good some books are bad Cristo is… well, you really have to read it to find out. Let’s begin with a compliment: The Count of Monte Cristo is one of those books it is impossible to label satisfactorily. That said, if you want to remain completely, utterly, unimpeachably unspoiled and an entirely blank slate for your first reading of the book, read no further! And, I’d suggest, go and live in a cave somewhere until you get around to reading it, because otherwise I don’t know how you’re going to avoid these spoilers… However, I have assumed that after 173 years of high publicity, literally hundreds of stage, film, TV, graphic novel and musical adaptations (IMDB lists 200 screen works with “Monte Cristo” in the name some are allusions or individual episodes or coincidence, but then there’ll be a bunch of other adaptations without that specific name in the title (Japanese versions ususally call it something else, for instance) even Wikipedia lists nearly 40 notable ones), not to mention sequels, prequels, and reimaginings, in dozens of languages (there have been 116 years of Japanese adaptations alone!)… well, I’m hoping that the broad, general, no-names-mentioned outline of what the novel is about will not be a spoiler for most of you. I have still refrained from any detailed or specific spoilers about the plot, particularly its conclusion.
Yay! Not only have I finished reading this behemoth, which took me forever (not entirely the fault of the book, I should make clear), but I’ve even, finally, finished writing a review of it!īut, first, a WARNING! – I always try to keep my reviews as spoiler-free as possible, but I found that really hard this time.
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