Back to the Future: Stephen Fry Updates a Dumas Classic
When Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844, he almost certainly did not have thirteen-year-old American boys in mind as his prime audience. But when I first read the classic in the summer of 1963, I knew for certain that I, too, was living the horror of Edmond Dantes life. Dantes, a good and innocent man, was cruelly implicated in treason by three friends who envied Dantes’ pending ship captaincy and marriage to the beautiful Mercedes. Dantes is sent to the notorious Chateau d’If by Villefort when the prosecutor discovers that a letter Dantes was carrying was to be delivered to Villefort’s father, a secret Bonapartist.
My own predicament was only slightly less dire than that of Dantes. I was being cruelly imprisoned for the summer in the home of my aunt, great aunt and grandmother, five hundred miles from my friends who were experiencing the joy of the beach and girls in bikinis every single day. I empathized with Dantes even if I secretly knew that I would be freed at the end of August in time for the new school year.
Decades later, I had passed the phase of devouring 19th Century classics. My tastes ran more to things like, say, the BBC’s Jeeves and Wooster. The writing was inspired, the humor classic. Alexandre Dumas? Old school. Very old school. Then, last year, while browsing my local library’s book sale, I picked up a copy of Stephen Fry’s 2000 novel, Revenge. I was vaguely aware that Fry, best known in America for films such as Peter’s Friends and Gosford Park, was also a writer, but I had never read any of his works.
When I picked up Revenge last week and started reading the book, it took me about sixty pages to realize that I was immersed in The Count of Monte Cristo. The story line has been updated (the action begins in 1980 rather than 1813). Ned Maddstone is seventeen, Oxford-bound, head boy at his private school, and head over heels in love with Portia whom he met at a Hard Rock Café in London. But his very success makes other around him envious, and they set out to put an obstacle in his charmed life by planting drugs on him and alerting the police.
When Maddstone is arrested, though, something else is found: a letter containing a list of names of prominent Britons together with a code phrase used by the IRA to authenticate its actions prior to acts of terror. Just as the letter being carried by Dantes was entrusted to him by his dying captain together with the letter’s whispered addressee, so Maddstone has no idea of the contents of the letter he has been given by the dying Irish captain of a boat on which he had been crewing. When Maddstone divulges the name and address of the intended recipient of the letter to the detective questioning him, wheels are set in motion to get rid of Maddstone in such a way that he will never be heard from again. Yep, same book.
The rest of the story of meticulously plotted revenge updates Dumas with late twentieth century trappings. The role of Abbe Faria, the Italian priest and intellectual imprisoned for his political views is played by Babe, a one-time British intelligence agent who secreted away a fortune in MI-5 funds before being found out. Instead of a treasure cache on the island of Monte Cristo, the loot is in a Swiss Bank.
There are some very clever bits that underscore Maddstone’s fifteen years in captivity: he arrives in the world of 1995 never having seen a cell phone or a personal computer, and the internet is beyond his comprehension. But none of this detracts from the awful reality that Ned Maddstone was deprived of his life. He is now fabulously wealthy and knows who set him up for the horror he has endured. He sets out to exact that retribution.
Fry departs from Dumas’s story only at the end. I’m still pondering if it is better ending or simply one with a modern sensibility. Perhaps it is something in Fry’s character that he chose the denoument that he did.
All this is my way of saying that this is a good book. Yes, it is more than a decade old, probably sold poorly in America, and is likely out of print. But I note it is available in a Kindle edition. I read it in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it.
My own predicament was only slightly less dire than that of Dantes. I was being cruelly imprisoned for the summer in the home of my aunt, great aunt and grandmother, five hundred miles from my friends who were experiencing the joy of the beach and girls in bikinis every single day. I empathized with Dantes even if I secretly knew that I would be freed at the end of August in time for the new school year.
Decades later, I had passed the phase of devouring 19th Century classics. My tastes ran more to things like, say, the BBC’s Jeeves and Wooster. The writing was inspired, the humor classic. Alexandre Dumas? Old school. Very old school. Then, last year, while browsing my local library’s book sale, I picked up a copy of Stephen Fry’s 2000 novel, Revenge. I was vaguely aware that Fry, best known in America for films such as Peter’s Friends and Gosford Park, was also a writer, but I had never read any of his works.
When I picked up Revenge last week and started reading the book, it took me about sixty pages to realize that I was immersed in The Count of Monte Cristo. The story line has been updated (the action begins in 1980 rather than 1813). Ned Maddstone is seventeen, Oxford-bound, head boy at his private school, and head over heels in love with Portia whom he met at a Hard Rock Café in London. But his very success makes other around him envious, and they set out to put an obstacle in his charmed life by planting drugs on him and alerting the police.
When Maddstone is arrested, though, something else is found: a letter containing a list of names of prominent Britons together with a code phrase used by the IRA to authenticate its actions prior to acts of terror. Just as the letter being carried by Dantes was entrusted to him by his dying captain together with the letter’s whispered addressee, so Maddstone has no idea of the contents of the letter he has been given by the dying Irish captain of a boat on which he had been crewing. When Maddstone divulges the name and address of the intended recipient of the letter to the detective questioning him, wheels are set in motion to get rid of Maddstone in such a way that he will never be heard from again. Yep, same book.
The rest of the story of meticulously plotted revenge updates Dumas with late twentieth century trappings. The role of Abbe Faria, the Italian priest and intellectual imprisoned for his political views is played by Babe, a one-time British intelligence agent who secreted away a fortune in MI-5 funds before being found out. Instead of a treasure cache on the island of Monte Cristo, the loot is in a Swiss Bank.
There are some very clever bits that underscore Maddstone’s fifteen years in captivity: he arrives in the world of 1995 never having seen a cell phone or a personal computer, and the internet is beyond his comprehension. But none of this detracts from the awful reality that Ned Maddstone was deprived of his life. He is now fabulously wealthy and knows who set him up for the horror he has endured. He sets out to exact that retribution.
Fry departs from Dumas’s story only at the end. I’m still pondering if it is better ending or simply one with a modern sensibility. Perhaps it is something in Fry’s character that he chose the denoument that he did.
All this is my way of saying that this is a good book. Yes, it is more than a decade old, probably sold poorly in America, and is likely out of print. But I note it is available in a Kindle edition. I read it in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it.
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