August review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 1996. [Historical Mystery category]
The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a an interesting novel. The main players all have shadows from great literature wound into their characters, and the main plot line hinges on the authentication of an old chapter of a Dumas manuscript, the line between reality and fiction ever blurring. Our protagonist--though not our narrator--is middle-aged cynic Lucas Corso, book detective, and we follow him on two seemingly intertwined errands: one for a fellow mercenary of the book industry in authenticating a lost manuscript chapter from The Three Musketeers; the other a mysterious side project for which he is being paid handsomely, researching a satanic book called The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book that only has three known copies. As he follows the trails of clues from Spain to Sintra to Paris, his life becomes dangerously entwined with fiction in a way that he cannot get ahead of. The narrative power lies with a seemingly inconsequential character who fades into the background after a few acknowledgements, Boris Balkan, and this subtle omniscience helps to set the stage for the way the book is going to deal with its themes. His presence in the background almost causes the reader to not realize that Pérez-Reverte is constantly changing the rules of the story, leaving us as much in the dark as our dispassionate "hero" is. There are always characters around Corso that know more than he does, and as hard as he tries to gain their knowledge, he can never quite get there. Case in point is the mysterious girl Corso falls into line with, the girl with the striking green eyes who introduces herself as Irene Adler and gives no explanation to her part in the narrative. All the women especially have this one-step-ahead quality.
Speaking of young Irene, allow to indulge my favorite intellectual pastime and look at the lady characters! The three major players are Liana Taillefer, the Girl, and Baroness Frieda Ungern, each compared to an incredibly competent fictional figures: Milady de Winter from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Miss Marple of Agatha Christie's mystery novels, respectively. These characters are surprising in all their respective stories, always self-confident and knowledgeable and ultimately capable of fulfilling their own agendas. It translates nicely to the three women in Corso's new whirlwind adventure.
The first one we meet is Liana Taillefer, widow of the publisher whose untimely death snarled all this business up. Liana is very obviously sexualized from the start, from our distant narrator taking advantage of her while she thought she was making a trade, to her apparent seduction of Corso's friend La Ponte (who hired Corso for the Dumas project in the first place). And then she is increasingly compared to Milady, a character from the very story she is trying to authenticate. Toward the end of the tale, the narrator brings up an interesting debate about the character of Milady,
Second is the Girl, the one with the striking green eyes who keeps showing up in Corso's line of sight, the one who unsmilingly deems herself Irene Adler. She is the young one, she represents youth, dispassionate knowledge, some sort of baffling protection. Corso ends up sleeping with her as well, but it isn't as easy as taking Liana Taillefer. The Girl speaks to Corso on a level that is lower than consciousness, than logical thought, but all the same a level that he needs as much as his constant imbibing of Bols gin.
Third but possibly most important is Baroness Frieda Ungern, the last stop on Corso's Nine Doors treasure hunt. Linked to brilliant and crafty Miss Marple, f all the owners of The Nine Doors, the Baroness is the most forthcoming, the most knowledgeable, most down-to-earth. She engages Corso more than any of the other owners of the Nine Doors, and her cult status as a witch intrigues him. She got the book from Madame de Montespan--another powerful, outspoken woman. There is history here out in the open, and Corso doesn't have to equivocate or break back in at night to absorb it. It was a meeting of the minds on an equal plane, and even though Corso held some things back, Baroness is no fool. She helped him more than the other two owners combined, and her wisdom helped Corso to solve the case eventually.
Not only did Pérez-Reverte take historical characters and events for his literary thriller, but he also mimicked the style of the very stories he used as his backdrop. I say this in terms of the format and tone Pérez-Reverte employs: The Club Dumas looks at serials like that of Dumas, including some substantial historical information about the rise of serials and the tendencies of Alexandre Dumas, père, and each chapter sort of feels like a chapter in a serial, ending with the sword looming ominously above the neck, an untold secret just come to light, a near-death experience. Sure it is a little disconnected, and you have to wait until the next page to realize what the characters have already pieced together, but I think it adds to the playfulness with which Pérez-Reverte deals with the idea of a serial. It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of the style that lends itself nicely to the "historical mystery" category.
As for my overall opinion of the book? I enjoyed it, it was a nice change of pace. The last third of the book hit me almost at a jumble, with the coalescence of two different stories, and I was as confused as Corso when they didn't all fit together, but somehow it worked better for me. It reinforced the line between reality and fiction that had become so blurred throughout the novel. Apparently Roman Polanski fudged up that ending in his lifted The Ninth Gate (1999) starring Johnny Depp, but that's a different story.
