Daniel’s Reviews > The Baron of Magister Valley > Status Update

That is a long book.

Yes! I generally think most books should have been tightened up by like a third and avoid long stuff these days, but Monte Cristo is one of my all-time favorites. This is fortunately much shorter, but I find myself mildly disappointed between the fun bits.

I remember feeling about the same reading Brust's adaptation of 3 Musketeers.

I loved the first one though it's been years and years since I read it. This is the sixth book he's written in that style and quite frankly a lot of the repetitive dialog patterns have long overstayed their welcome. It just feels like padding at this point.

I enjoyed the first one, but after that the conceit dragged for me. Have you read Freedom and Necessity? I liked that one a lot even though it is also word-heavy.

Mir wrote: "I enjoyed the first one, but after that the conceit dragged for me. Have you read Freedom and Necessity? I liked that one a lot even though it is also word-heavy."

Ah! Yes, that's been on my TBR for years, thanks for the reminder. And it's epistolary too, which I enjoy. I think I started it once and got distracted or something, but I will dig it out.

"Imagine if in The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count didn't do anything impressive until page 850." --- ah, so... like The Count of Monte Cristo?

[I mean, it's like 40 chapters before he politely asks someone to release a hostage, and the next 50 chapters are mostly 'Count goes to the opera', 'Count buys some horses', 'Count pretends to be someone else in order to pretend that Count is investigating rumours of a mineral spring on his property' and so forth. Until the last 20 or 30 chapters, the Count is mostly confined to scheming and brooding...

Heh, :) Your memory must be better than mine. It's been some years since I read The Count, but I'm sure something interesting must have happened before page 850 or I'd not have gotten that far. I do like the scheming. Here he doesn't even get out of the prison till half way through the book.

Some years here too, to be honest. But the pacing in the novel is insane (albeit not as insane as "doesn't get out until halfway", that really is stupid). Checking chapter summaries, he gets out around chapter 20 (of 117) but the actual novel doesn't really start until chapter 40 or so. There whole book is kind of a short novel, a short story, a novella, and then a big novel: the first 30 chapters are a novel about Dantes, getting imprisoned, escaping, finding treasure, going back to find out what's happened while he's been gone, saving a friend, then disappearing. There's a multi-year time gap again, and a weird tangential story about a random guy encountering a weird sailor guy ('Sinbad') and them taking a lot of drugs. Then there's kind of a novella set in Italy, introducing the mysterious Count in the third person, but mostly a frame story for the history of a random Italian brigand. THEN we finally turn up in Paris for the revenge novel that takes up the remaining 80-odd chapters.

It's a very strange structure for those of us not used to authors serialising novels and making it up as they go along - it's kind of more like a modern TV show, where there can be major refocusing between seasons. As a result, I think every adaptation of the story I've ever encountered has made some serious changes to the structure. Usually, skipping the 10 chapters in the middle, although I think it might actually make more sense to skip the first 30 instead, and just begin with the Count being introduced mysteriously, with the backstory woven in later on.

Even once the main story gets going, the Count is more like the Big Bad of the season in some ways, prodding things along, instigating or reacting to the interesting developments to various extents, rather than acting directly - he gently encourages the serial killer, he sets up the lesbian with the murderous husband, etc. It's very episodic, and surprisingly little of the book is actually the outright punishment of the villains (and then there's a too-long epilogic bit where the Count repents while torturing his friend psychologically).

[I think it's part of why the story works despite its fault. It's not just "rawr, I have escaped wrongful imprisonment and will destroy you all!", it's more... iirc one inspiration for the novel was a story about a demon appearing one night and showing a guy what Paris was really like by letting him see inside houses, and that's kind of how it works. The Count is both the devil who opens up these rich houses to scrutiny, and the observer who judges the sins of the inhabitants (including ultimately himself), but for the most part the Count is just the catalyst to allow everyone's own sins to devour them (at least, he sees himself that way).]

I'm tempted now to go look for CofMC fanfic, although I've never actually read the novel.