I am a high-brow reader. Not very high-brow in many other aspects of my life, as you may have gathered. But I rarely read a piece of popular fiction. Maybe for reasons of snobbery or maybe because I don’t like to be drawn through the sensibility gutter. Too much of that, which is unavoidable, happens in everyday life. However, I find myself reading Le conte de Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas pere. It is 1500 pages and I’ve got 150 left. It can’t be bad to have pulled me through. The plot is terrific. A man unjustifiably put in a prison on a deserted island off the coast of Marseille and left to rot. Another prisoner connects with him, having scratched his way through the dirt for years. This remarkable man teaches Edmond (our hero) everything he knows: languages; style; learning of all sorts. He dies and Edmond substitutes himself for the corpse and is thrown into the sea from which he escapes. A hoard of treasure on the island of Monte Christo had been revealed to him by his former prison-mate. Edmond finds it and becomes inestimably rich. He spends years on the sea, honing his life skills and then heads for Paris to revenge the four men who betrayed him. He kills them off one by one.
The problem is that the character of Edmond Dantes is an absolute; totally inhuman. He is so clever and refined and rich; he is a kind of superhero. His revenge is thoughtless. It ruins the family and children of all the betrayers; people who are innocent. Dumas does not see that his character is a problem. He could have examined the nature of absolute revenge in this long book, but that doesn’t interest him. Unfortunately the novel remains on the level of a teenage fantasy. Still, it’s a good yarn and has been adapted for the cinema many times, each time taking out scenes where Edmond is particulaly unpleasant, as well as skirting round moments where the ethics of 1842 do not match ours (less of an issue for me; sometimes they show up the sham of some of our ethics).
peoplearerubbish 