To Know One’s Self For Fortune’s Fool

Phew, sorry about being gone so long, everybody. I still don’t have internet in my new home, but at least the personal distractions that kept me from doing any reading have slowed down, if not stopped entirely. I did a good deal of catching up the other night, and most importantly finished a book whose review I will present you with now. Posting will continue, but may still be sparse for a bit.

Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.
- p. 134

If there is one thing that Rafael Sabatini was good at above all others, it was making a reader feel for the misfortunes of his characters. A typical Sabatini hero, though very well sketched, may not always be the most profound or realistic character in existence. Yet when that same protagonist is grievously wronged the reader can become as frustrated, and indeed as furious, as the character themselves. This is done not only by engendering sympathy for the character, but by constructing incredibly devious and unfair wrongs to inflict upon them, and by perfectly describing the flaws of character in those responsible that lead them to do such things to our hero–sometimes even deceptively harmless things that come at just the wrong moment. Sabatini’s skill at this suggests–to me, anyway–a writer who really took something significant away from the first part of The Count of Monte Cristo, in which Edmund Dantes is so terribly victimized due to the whims of three other men. I would even venture to say, however, that Sabatini was better at this kind of thing than Dumas, only because he was often able to drum up such intense feelings of anger at the working of fate in a much smaller number of pages (Dumas was many things, but never terse).

Sabatini heroes are always the victims of unfair circumstances. The author’s most famous and oft-used setup gives us a character who is living a good, happy life, only to be violently wrenched from it by the workings of greed, fate, jealousy, etc. (As in Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche–the latter of which also later included the dissolution of a relationship so painfully unfair that it quite literally made me bristle.) In Fortune’s Fool, on the other hand, Sabatini presents us with the story of one Randal Holles, a man who never seems to have that good life as a starting point. When we meet Holles, life has already nearly beaten him down, and as the story progresses things continue to go wrong. They then do so over and over again, and only ever seem to get worse. Poor bastard.

There really is no one great thrust to the story, as Holles spends the first half of the book looking for work, while the plot changes pretty constantly in the second half. In fact, my biggest criticism of Fortune’s Fool is that the plot meanders a bit at times, and the climax is a bit lackluster. It’s perfectly satisfying from a character perspective, but as a Sabatini fan I was expecting more suspense–unfortunately, suspense seems to have already been used up by the end of the book. Thankfully, the middle section in which it is so used is very exciting and enjoyable.

Without giving away too much of the plot, I will simply say that our hero finds himself embroiled in the amorous affairs of the Duke of Buckingham. As a fan of Dumas, it is a little strange to see a character who had been shown so favorably before (he is the son of the Buckingham in The Three Musketeers, and a major character in later Musketeers books) as such a pompous asshole, but it’s also pretty damn fun. This is especially so when he tries to woo the female lead through the sort of trickery and false heroics that handsome villains always attempt–it’s a wonderful scene because our heroine doesn’t believe it for a goddamned second.

It’s worth noting that the female lead, while no fighter, is quite the smart, competent, and heroic figure for a novel from 1924. But for all the interesting touches that she brings to the latter portions of the book, it is certainly Randal Holles’ show. His character is so destitute, and wavers so wonderfully between being unflappable and… er… flappable that the reader is transfixed, and genuinely wonders when the protagonist will finally give in and commit one of these morally reprehensible acts that keep presenting themselves to him. He is far from flawless, and watching how years of bad luck thrash him until he begins making decisions that will simply bring about more of the same is sickly intriguing.

(Sabatini almost always gave his characters happy endings, but it can be very fun to wonder how in hell he will manage to get to such a point.)

To add to the character dramas playing out, Fortune’s Fool is set during the Restoration… and so also during the last great outbreak of the plague in London. It’s fascinating to watch day-to-day life as the plague slowly creeps up into the background of the book. Throughout the first half the sickness isn’t anything that really bothers any of our central characters, or that changes the dynamics of the city, it simply tiptoes about in our peripheral vision–dropping someone here, closing a house there. When it does come into the main story it does so at the most incredible and shocking moment.

Fortune’s Fool is, regrettably, not in print at the moment. I was lucky enough to get my hand on a beautiful copy from 1924, complete with incredible drawings that I would scan had I a scanner, for a measly six dollars. I assume that most paperback copies from decades later will be more than affordable. The novel is not quite on the level of Sabatini’s best, like Captain Blood or Scaramouche, but it sits quite comfortably amongst those still-very-good secondary works of his. While a bit light on adventure, the setting and the central character of Fortune’s Fool–not to mention Sabatini’s flair for the English language, the sixth language that he learned–make it definitely worth reading for a fan of the genre.