25: The Count of Monte Cristo

A book by Alexandre Dumas

When one is slightly sceptical about their own ability to meet a target, it is perhaps unwise to make things harder for oneself. For example, if one is resolved to reading 50 books in the year 2020—38 more than in 2019—but is a slow reader, maybe stick around the 200-400-page mark. Leave the War and Peaces, the Suitable Boys, the Infinite Jests of this world for another year.

But what fun is that? Why not make things even harder? And when it’s mid-lockdown and there’s more time to kill than ever before, why not reach for Penguin Classics’s 1276-page hardback edition of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one to go tome-tastic during lockdown. Penguin Random House recently reported a 2020 boom in sales of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, and, yes, War and Peace. It makes sense. When one’s own life becomes limited, there are few better ways to stave off boredom than to live in the world of a great book for a while.

And what a world Dumas created in The Count of Monte Cristo. The plot is well known even to those who have never read it. Edmond Dantes—“tall, slim, with fine dark eyes and ebony-black hair”—is thrown in prison for a crime he didn’t commit after being set up by a handful of jealous, self-serving rivals. While incarcerated at the Chateau d’If, an island prison, for 14 years he learns from a fellow inmate of a hoard of treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. After a daring escape, Dantes finds the concealed fortune and uses his new-found wealth and power to take his revenge on the men who betrayed him.

In his introduction to the book, Robin Buss recounts the reaction he got from a Russian film-maker when he told her he was translating The Count of Monte Cristo. “Ah, a children’s novel,” she said. It’s an instructive, if absurd, comment. There are some aspects of Dumas’s novel that would appeal to children. The breakneck pace, the swashbuckling adventure, the clear line between good and evil. However, as Buss points out, “there are not many children’s books that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides; an extended scene of torture and execution; drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism; a display of the author’s classical learning, and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diet of the Italians, the effects of hashish, and so on.” Nor are there many children’s books that are this long.

The length should not be a barrier to picking up this fantastic, bombastic book. It is hugely unlikely it would get published now without some serious edits. So thank goodness Dumas was putting pen to paper 170ish years ago. The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel to luxuriate in, to get lost in, to revel in, to live in. The story itself is labyrinthine and satisfying, mixing religion with revenge, love with hate, cruelty with justice, disguise with shocking revelation. It’s energetic, endlessly dramatic, and contains some truly stunning turns of phrase. Here’s just one: “Hatred is blind and anger deaf: the one who pours himself a cup of vengeance is likely to drink a bitter draught.”

Maybe instead of vengeance then, pour yourself a cup of wine or nine, open up The Count of Monte Cristo, and savour a properly epic book. I certainly did.