Starting a pile, and starting it with The Count of Monte Cristo
The reason for this site is simple and slightly petty: I finish a book, I have four or five clear thoughts about it, and three weeks later I can recall none of them. Whole novels have collapsed into a single adjective. So I am going to write a short piece about most of what I read, mainly for me, and keep the pile visible so I stop pretending it is shorter than it is.
First up is the one that took most of the summer. Twelve hundred pages in a fat paperback that broke its spine somewhere around the middle and had to be carried in a bag rather than a pocket.
It is not the book I expected from the reputation. The reputation is: wrongful imprisonment, escape, treasure, revenge. That is roughly the first quarter. The remaining three quarters are a long, patient, extremely detailed social novel in which a very rich man moves into a city and rearranges the lives of everyone who wronged him by means of dinner invitations, credit, gossip, and property. There are stretches with no action at all where the tension is unbearable, because you know what the guest at the table is for.
What kept me going was structure. Dumas is superb at planting an obligation and calling it in four hundred pages later. A small kindness on page ninety pays out on page eight hundred. It was serialised, and you can feel it: every chapter ends with a reason to continue, and the machinery is completely unashamed.
The flaws are real. There are two or three subplots that read as padding. Several women in the book exist to be virtuous or to faint. And the last hundred pages hedge: after a thousand pages arguing that the count is an instrument of providence, the book gets nervous about what it has been enjoying, and the retreat into moralising feels imposed rather than earned.
Still: it earns its length in a way most long books do not. If you have been intimidated by the page count, the thing to know is that the pages turn very fast. I averaged sixty a night without effort.
Next on the pile: something under three hundred pages, for the sake of my wrists.