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, deep in the hinterlands and 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.
This book left me in a mixture of emotions. It starts off in a plain, dictative manner, the usual bunch of kids caught up in jealousy and such. Then, it takes a detour and parades as a thriller for a while, managing to be quite convincing in the spontaneity of it all. Once the suspense gets going, it falls flat, all the background stories out in the open all of a sudden and about a hundred pages where the hero literally learns everything under the sun and transforms into an avenger. These parts...the ones with Babe, the transfer of genius, the flawless plans, escape and return were just bland, stereotypical and outright formulaic. (I've been trying to learn a new language for years now and somehow progress is sluggish, but Ned learns multiple languages, chess, backgammon, other assorted stuff, not to mention how to break out of an asylum, and everything about computers and the internet, all this for someone who did not know anything about it to begin with, in record time.) The novel loses credibility once Ned embraces his past and swears revenge. From that point it reads like a fast-paced, clichéd Indian masala movie where the hero's entire life is traced in the space of a single song. That said, I liked the fact that Fry did not try to make Ned go moral and repenting, and made him stick to dishing out consequences right up to the end. Does it make me a sadist that I think those that plotted against him deserved it? Life isn't fair, I agree, but those guys consciously altered the course of Ned's life and it is only fitting that they get consciously paid back, no matter if Gordon went chicken and Portia fell out of love with Ned. Karma is a bitch, or as in this case, Karma is Ned Maddstone. The portions where Ned extracts revenge as Simon are super cheesy but super easy to read. They just fly past. This is probably not the best book to begin with while getting introduced to Fry, but I'll be diving into his backlist anyway.
What do You think about Revenge (aka The Stars’ Tennis Balls) (2003)?
Revenge is a modern re-telling of The Count of Monte Cristo. It is very well done, because Fry manages to take the elements of Dumas’ novel that take the most suspension of disbelief and make them believable in a modern setting. It’s a clever twist on an old story – with updated methods of revenge, and a clever twist on the old characters (With puns! The character of the Count’s finance is changed from Mercedes to Portia – hee!). It’s suspenseful as well, a major feat considering that I not only knew the ending but had just read the original a month ago.While the book does an excellent job in making the story more plausible than Dumas’ version, the modern retelling also highlights the central problem with the book. That is, that while revenge is satisfying to read about, it is not a particularly healthy way to live one's life or the best way to solve problems. While Dumas unreservedly encourages the reader to root for the Count’s plan, Fry’s tale is much more morally ambiguous. His “Count” (here named Ned) has everything a man could want – riches, smarts and fame. Is what happened to him early on that bad, that he should ruin these lesser mens’ lives? Particularly since his early experience is what led him to have these great things? Fry stacks the deck a bit toward ambiguity, in his story three of the four men upon whom revenge is sought were not really seeking to ruin Ned’s life – just to humiliate him a bit, and it all went miserably wrong. In the Dumas original, all the men were seriously trying to ruin Dantes, so it was more satisfying when they were destroyed. Here, Fry presses harder on the question of whether Ned’s cause is a worthy one. Leaving the reader with a clever, action packed book that asks some serious questions about life. What more could you want?On a side note, Fry, a British author, is probably best known as an actor. He’s been in many, many movies, and is probably best known, in America, at least, as Jeeves in the most recent adaptations of Wodehouse novels (which are absolutely awesome). I’ve read two of his other books, which while more strictly comedic, are fun, too.
—Carrie
I need to catch up on my Stephen Fry, I mean aside from my marathon sessions of watching "QI" episodes on youtube (a shout out here to "Nickfromfulham" for posting them all). I read The Liar and The Hippopotamus many years ago, and found them both to be brilliant; I read his memoir, Moab is My Washpot, and was less favorably impressed. This reworked Count of Monte Cristo story falls somewhere in between. Of course the writing is excellent, the erudition is breathtaking, and the humor is insidious; I did mention that this was written by Stephen Fry, did I not? The problem might be that he set out writing a Patricia Highsmith story, of twisted jealousies on the parts of the conspirators, and he's just too sane to carry that off. Even the somewhat Baroque, Jacobean comeuppances suffered by the baddies are more humorous than scarifying. Stephen Fry suffers from being more P.G. Wodehouse than Patricia Highsmith, and that is a good thing.
—Spiros
I recently read a couple of hard-boiled thrillers which were complex and sustained interest pretty much to the end. Revenge (published in the UK as "The Stars' Tennis Balls") was a more leisurely read, at least for the first two sections. A fortunate, likeable and blameless 17 year old has his life turned on its head. We feel helpless anger at what is happening to him. Fry writes sometimes with an angry contempt of some of the characters and the thriller turns into a morality play. But a thrilling, frightening one! Fry's writing style is delicious.
—Barbara
