Review - The Count of Monte Cristo

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!

  • Your Friend, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo”

The concluding sentence of The Count of Monte Cristo offers possibly the best description of the experience of reading the novel I’ve encountered. At its core, The Count of Monte Cristo is just a damn good story: through the exposition, the reader gets a sense of the direction of the massive chain of events, and gets to wait, hope, and finally experience the payoff in the end. It’s like the best fairy tale you can imagine—you know a happy ending is coming, but hearing the story itself is so fun.

I read this book because I am a huge fan of the 2002 film. As such, I was surprised when Dantes’ escape from D’If happens fewer than 200 pages into the 1,200 page epic. I was totally unprepared for the sheer amount of developments that would follow.

Some of the things I liked:

  • The entire Villefort fiasco. The setup was the most comprehensive, the fall was the hardest, and the Dantes reveal was the most realistic and impactful of the three.
  • Valentine + Morrel love story.
  • Eugenie Danglars.
  • Monte Cristo’s weed trips.
  • The break from the traditional perspective that you can’t escape your blood traits. Albert de Morcef gains redemption at the end, along with Eugenie Danglars and Valentine de Villefort. The sins of the father were not rent on the children.
  • The downfall of Fernand, Villefort, and Danglars is much more predicated on their failings and sins AFTER the Dantes scandal in the novel as opposed to the movie. Monte Cristo doesn’t drege old, past developments into the light; rather, he uses the corruption now to bring about their ruin.
  • Along similar lines, Monte Cristo has much more of a transformation in the novel. Dantes truly dies in the prison—the creature that emerges is infalliable, powerful, and perfectly fits into Parisian society.

What I didn’t like:

  • The ramifications of this transformation for Mercedes. In the movie, the character of Monte Cristo is much closer to Dantes wearing a mask. In the novel, Dantes, the man Mercedes loved, is truly dead. Thus, they cannot end up together.
  • Haydee. Not only is her pairing with Monte Cristo made uncomfortable by the age gap, but also by the dynamic between them. She was his slave, and he addressed her as his child throughout the entire book. When the dynamic quickly switches to romantic in the final chapter it left me feeling a bit squeamish. On top of this, Haydee never demonstrates many positive qualities that would presumably attract Monte Cristo other than “being a beautiful, exotic Greek.”
  • The Cadarousse fiasco. Although such stories usually require suspension of disbelief, when we learn that Cadarousse’s wife’s murder was witnessed by the man who A. was wronged by Villefort, B. stole Villefort’s son, C. attemped Villefort’s murder, and D. climbed into the cupboard in Cadarousse’s house for no apparent reason, alongside the facts that A. he never recognized Villefort or his wife later, B. Cadarousse never recognized HIM later, C. Cadarousse managed to escape from prison, and D. Monte Cristo somehow knew all of these facts in advance, makes the suspension of disbelief ridiculous compared to some of the other scenarios.
  • The character of Franz d’Epinay. He learns an enormous amount about Monte Cristo during the Rome fiasco, disappears for half the novel, and then comes back tame and unconcerning. There seems to be little motivation for Monte Cristo to allow someone close to Morcef to observe how he operates behind the curtain, and I don’t understand how Franz is so comparitively meek when he returns to Paris.

I know that was a lot of nitpicks, but that doesn’t change the fact that this story is INCREDIBLE. I think it a must-read for anyone who has a heart for justice.

✭✭✭✭✭