Have you read?: The Count of Monte Cristo

You may not have read, or even heard of, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), but it is one of the greatest historical novels and most influential books ever written. It is also, in its essentials, a children’s story. Granted, it weighs-in at over 1,200 pages, features a host of characters and multiple complex and overlapping storylines, includes scenes of violent rape, murder, torture, overt lesbianism and psychedelic drug-induced hallucinations, and explores the meaning of fate and human suffering. But it’s still a children’s adventure story, and probably the best one ever written.

Edmond Dantes makes a living as a sailor on-board a merchant ship. He’s soon to be moving up in the world of 19th century Marseille, both with his promised promotion and inevitable marriage to a beautiful young Catalan girl, Mercedes, whom he loves as much as he does his doting father. All-in-all, things are going okay. Or they were, until his friend Fernand, who is secretly in love with Mercedes, and colleague Danglers, who resents Edmond’s looming promotion, begin to hate his success in life. They conspire to fabricate evidence of Edmond being in league with Napoleon’s remaining supporters, and through their machinations – and those of the ambitious Crown-Prosecutor, Villefort – Edmond is arrested and hauled off to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

He spends years alone in a forgotten cell in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If, and is about to commit suicide when, at the pinnacle of his despair, he hears a scratching sound coming from the adjacent cell, made by the equally desperate Abbe Faria. The two prisoners gradually dig a tunnel between their compartments, end their mutual isolation, and become comrades. Faria teaches Edmond about history, languages, and sciences; most importantly, however, he reveals the whereabouts of a secret cave full of treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. When Faria succumbs to his illnesses and dies, Edmond uses the opportunity to escape (with a few minor complications like being thrown into the sea with his legs wrapped in chains) and locate the treasure, only to find that his enemies have flourished during his incarceration. Styling himself now as the Count of Monte Cristo, he gains access to Parisian civil society and plots an elaborate web of vengeance, ending in a final act of forgiveness and his ultimate salvation.

Now, if all that doesn’t make for a good story, I don’t know what does. And if you’re looking for an engrossing read to keep you occupied for the next 4 to 8 months, then you need to find this book. Besides containing everything you could ask of an adventure novel, it will stick with you for years and probably become your new favourite book. Inexplicably, however, some readers can’t get along with it. This is, I think, down to two related facts: they’re either put-off by the sheer bulk of the text (like I said, it’s not exactly a short story; not as much of a leviathan as War and Peace, but that’s not saying much); or the multitude of characters and interconnecting plot threads seems circuitous and ends up being too hard to follow. That’s a fair enough point, as we’re not digesting it in one sitting, but the characterisations and intrigues more than make up for that, to the point where you no longer care how a particular episode fits in to the overall narrative – you become so engrossed that your only concern is the fate of the particular character you’re reading about.

It’s hard to understate the impact which The Count of Monte Cristo has had on popular culture over the last two centuries. For a start, there would be no Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, characters who both find their literary antecedent in the urbane, composed, and manipulative figure of the Count. The narrative style makes it feels as if Dumas is telling you the story in person, imposing his own character to comment on the atmosphere of carnival in Rome or the gastronomic delicacies of a particular town. And, of course, the characters are all so complete that you feel as if you know them (some, like the bandit Luigi Vampa, feel like they should have a starring role in their own novel). It’s not surprising, then, that, despite the novel’s size and complexity, the fascination with and sympathy due to the main protagonists is the secret of its enduring appeal.

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