A Beach Book For Intellectuals

Forgive me for stealing my title from the review excerpt on the cover for The Club Dumas, but it really sums up the book quite nicely.

It is a rare occurrence (for me, at least) when reading a book will really make me wish that I could have a conversation with the author. Not a conversation about the book, mind you, or about the author’s life, or anything really pertaining to him, but about a great interest that we both share a passion for. (And an interest more specific than simply writing, clearly.) The Club Dumas quite clearly showcases Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s love, not just for Alexandre Dumas, (still my favorite author) but for escapist, swashbuckling, and normally-serialized, adventure fiction on the whole. As I mentioned before, the novel begins with two characters discussing Sabatini–and so I fell in love.

Dumas and Sabatini are still both fairly well-known, but thank God for Wikipedia, otherwise I would’ve had to go through this novel page by page making a list of every author referenced who I hadn’t heard of. For my convenience, there is a list.

But all that I have proven so far is that Pérez-Reverte has good taste in books, how is The Club Dumas as a novel?

Well, it’s pretty damn good. The author manages to emulate both noir-esque mysteries and old style serials very effectively, and with this strange mish-mash (in a good way) of a plot he really has to.

Essentially, the book follows one Lucas Corso, a rather unsavory man who obsessive and wealthy book collectors hire to do their dirty work. While assigned to look at the only remaining three copies of a condemned, Satanic book from the 17th century, (the kind of thing that the modern thriller tale thrives upon) Corso also tries to squeeze in a bit of time helping a friend to identify what may or may not be an original Dumas manuscript. But then the people he is coming into contact with begin dying off, it becomes clear enough that someone is after him, he meets a mysterious and beautiful young girl, and strangely enough finds himself embroiled in what he himself sees as something of a hack-ish plot

He’d have given a rare incunabulum, in good condition, to punch the face of whoever was writing this ridiculous script.
- page 167

On top of all that, Corso finds himself encountering situations and characters that have strange similarities to Alexandre Dumas’ seminal The Three Musketeers, and that just serves to confuse him more. Needless to say, he begins to get an inkling that all of these strange happenings are linked, and with great frustration goes about discovering what exactly is behind all of it. To go on would, of course, give away too much. But I will say that the ending is very good, and actually gave me a few genuine surprises… which mysteries hardly do for me anymore.

The ending of a mystery is never the point for me anyway, it’s all in how we get there, and The Club Dumas is plenty exciting. Looking back on it I realize that the story doesn’t move all that fast–but that’s only in hindsight, in the moment it really does grab your attention and force you to spend hours on end reading it, if you have the time. Between this and Captain Alatriste I definitely get the feeling that Pérez-Reverte’s style is to write books that move slowly plot-wise but feel fast, and to let that be only slightly slowed by a very in-depth view of the protagonist’s character. There are paragraphs upon paragraphs about his past and thought process, to be sure.

Also, The Club Dumas acts, as I had before predicted, in a strangely similar vein to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in that at times it almost turns into a treatise on the value of escapist entertainment.

You know yourself that a novel, or a film made for pure consumption, can turn into an exquisite work, from The Pickwick Papers to Casablanca and Goldfinger. Audiences turn to these archetype-packed stories to enjoy, whether consciously or unconsciously, the device of repeated plots with small variations. Disposito rather than elocutio… That’s why the serial, even the most trite television serial, can become a cult both for a naive audience and for a more sophisticated one. There are people who find excitement in Sherlock Holmes’s risking his life, while others go for the pipe, the magnifying glass, and the ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ which, by the way, Conan Doyle never actually wrote.
- page 326

I should point out that this possibly dry little thesis is, in its original context, very passionate. The hero doesn’t spend much time expounding upon things like this, but many of the supporting characters (including the narrator, who makes intermittent appearances in the story) go off on such tangents. Don’t worry though, the book is also full of all the hard-drinking, mystery, and sex that you would hope.

Apparently, this book was also turned into a movie. Roman Polanski directed and Johnny Depp starred, but this version entirely excised all of the story’s connections to Dumas. Yeah… not interested in the slightest.

The Club Dumas is an exciting and iconoclastic little thriller for the well-read, and a veritable love letter to die-hard fans of Dumas. (In fact, I would suggest at least reading The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After beforehand, if you haven’t already, just for the sheer volume of spoilers in Pérez-Reverte’s book.) What’s more, if the titular club existed, I would desperately want to join.