A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
--Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"
Revenge is one of those things that shows up a lot in literature. Character is wronged, character doesn't feel justice can be served without retribution, character exacts revenge. It's a common plot, and what determines how worthy of a story it is comes down to the execution. Thankfully, Alexandre Dumas père did an excellent job of building an incredible revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo, enough so that despite the sizable tome (Penguin's edition, without counting the introduction and cultural notes, is 1243 pages long), you would be hard-pressed to find a list of the best revenge novels that doesn't include it.
So, what is it that makes this particular classic stand out so effectively? I would argue that its secret may be the level of mastery on display in the vengeance exacted by Edmond Dantés upon the men responsible for his life being ruined. The Count of Monte Cristo is largely taken up with the description of an elaborately-planned plot, designed to force those men past a despair event horizon so that they might know what it's like to have their lives destroyed so utterly... and even beyond that, it's important to him that in the end, those who are destroyed by him are aware of who has brought about their downfalls.
Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of. He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves. However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France. Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.
Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell. This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value. Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.
Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics. They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape. Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.
At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany. While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster. In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.
At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book. What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments. And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.
This is a long book. Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line. Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible. But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations. A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.
That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss. The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters. Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.
It's not a difficult read, it's just long. The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing. And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace. We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.
Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of. He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves. However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France. Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.
Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell. This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value. Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.
Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics. They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape. Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.
At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany. While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster. In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.
At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book. What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments. And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.
This is a long book. Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line. Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible. But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations. A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.
That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss. The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters. Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.
It's not a difficult read, it's just long. The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing. And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace. We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.
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