Tonight, I reached the end of a long road, that of reading The Count of Monte Cristo, one of those fat tomes that tend to daunt potential readers with preconceptions of weighty, challenging literary epics – but they forget that many classics survive because they are popular, indeed populist, and mid-19th-Century French readers wanted escapism and thrills as much as any other audience. The book is long because it was most lucrative to make a page-turner last for a long time. I would feel no compunction for comparing it not only to Dickens but to the lengthy comics and manga series that end with weekly cliffhangers, although Monte Cristo at least has a complete and evidently pre-planned storyline.
I don’t know why I feel I’ve known this story since childhood. I think perhaps I had an abridged version, or Mum sat me in front of some film adaptation, since it’s one of her favourite stories. But any book I would have had to have invested this much time in reading I would have remembered. (I remember reading Oliver Twist at 10 or 11, Roots at 12, Shogun at 14 etc.) Either way, thanks to anime adaptation Gankutsuou I was very familiar with the general thrust of the plot, but could not have been prepared for the sense of fun, the open embrace of melodrama and gothic overtones of Dumas’ work.
The greatest revenge story ever told, Edmond Dantes’ revenge for his false imprisonment on three members of high Parisian society, works superbly because even if every detail isn’t quite believable (potions to simulate death, horses that can be induced to run wild on time), and even if the melodrama gets a little excessive at times (twice Dumas undermines the impact of the most climactic points in the story, once by having Monte Cristo dragged up and down stairs when he’s supposed to be having a big confrontation, and once with the superb lines, ‘His eyes seemed to burn with a devouring fire. He leaped towards a dressing room’, which I can’t imagine being any less farcical in the original French), Dumas is writing about the present time, about contemporary fears and mores, and the way Monte Cristo exacts revenge, through wealth and the influence it buys in society, is utterly believable, and keeps our attention like a snake hypnotising its prey with its simple grace, its danger and the inevitability of what is going to happen as events take their course.
Amusingly, the editor of my Wordsworth Classics edition was quite a character, pointing out with Kinbotian glee every mistake the translator has made, and also as many of Dumas’ as he could spot. It doesn’t take one long, especially with such assistance, to see that Dumas didn’t care much for small details and wrote with great speed for a voracious audience who wanted only more drama, more thrills, more admirable verbal sparring within the constraints of polite 19th-Century society, and this exuberance is not at all diminished by time and distance. Enormous fun. It may be less sophisticated, nuanced, eloquent and moving than the near-contemporary Les Misérables, but it’s much more exciting, and with more of a playful sense of what in this day and age we term, ‘Cool’ – the invalid Noirtier who despite being able only to blink can still influence all those around him, the excitement of bandit kidnappings and courtroom showdowns (though another ‘too silly’ moment comes when the guilty simply cannot lie to save themselves, so powerful is TRUTH and JUSTICE), and of course the Count himself, who we see mostly through the eyes of others, and certainly leaves his impression.
Through the introduction, I learned with interest that Dumas had intended to open the story in Rome, where Gankutsuou begins, and have Dantès’ story as flashback, only for his collaborator Auguste Maquet, who it seems came up with more of the story than Dumas did, to suggest starting from the beginning. It was a wise choice in a serial novel, where much time can be taken to flesh out a character, to start there and build up our sympathy for Dantès, just as it was wise for Gankutsuou to start where it did for more dramatic tension in an anime series. Indeed, Gankutsuou did admittedly colour some of my reading for a time, making me more predisposed to the spoilt, snobbish, moustachioed Albert than perhaps I should have been, since in the anime, he has become the focus of the story, a very sweet, innocent, impressionable boy who hero-worships, in keeping with the anime’s wish to amplify all homoerotic undertones. For the same reason I expected Franz to be more prominent, since the anime makes his friendship with Albert seem more than simple affection between friends, and laughed when I realised that Beppo is described for one line in the book, but since he’s a boy that looks like a girl, Gonzo had to make a full character out of him! As the book went on, though, the colour added by the anime faded. Some faces were exactly aligned with those I imaged (Villefort) while others couldn’t be further from those of the book (Maximilian, Eugénie) – but suited their altered characters. The adaptation is a very loose one, with so much added melodrama that even the original book seems restrained by comparison, but a superb adaptation and an excellent companion piece.
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