RANTS AND RAMBLES

• NOTE: Though I strive to adequately support the opinions expressed in my reviews, they are still just opinions. If you like a book I hate, I’m happy for you. Additionally, while I regularly rant about mere irritants in a novel, something must be remarkably good to garner the same level of comment. This means my rants and rambles often skew more negative than I intend my review to be, so please refer to my overall star rating for my unified opinion on this book.
• This book was written as a serial for a newspaper and boy does it show. Lots of descriptions, conversations, and side quests seem to exist solely to meet word counts (or perhaps Dumas was being paid by the word). The story is meandering, verbose, and self-indulgent. Plot lines also sidetrack down paths to pointless destinations, more similar to a poorly written television show rather than a well-structured novel.
• Dialogue is quite extensive and mostly useless. This might be a hallmark of the time this story was written or it might be a product of the serial nature of its publication, but in either case, it does not get a pass. 50-80% of what is said is irrelevant small talk which, no matter how realistic, is super annoying. 75% of the remainder is winding and verbose. This makes everything in the book drag. A lot.
• Every room, carriage, and outfit in this novel is described in excruciating completeness. It is important to note that not all descriptions are irrelevant or over-described, but most are. It may be that with each chapter coming out in a new newspaper that the pacing, already hampered by the serial nature of publication, did not suffer much, but in novel form, this serves to torpedo any momentum each chapter manages to build.
• The main character and his mentor are flawless Mary Sues while supporting characters are usually as flat as a board. Due to the extreme and static nature of the people in the story, there are no meaningful arcs or character development in this story.
• MINOR SPOILERS: Dumas often wishes something to be so and so it is, regardless of feasibility. For example, there is a massive stone which hides the entrance to the grotto in which the treasure of Monte Cristo is hidden. This stone is very difficult to remove, and once dislodged, it rolls into the sea. Nevertheless, the Count is able to replace it with ease to conceal the chamber so that no one else can find it.
• MINOR SPOILERS: The Count is generally a horrible person with terrible ethics and non-existent morality. Some of his flaws include consorting with bandits and pirates who kill victims for lack of ransom, delighting in execution, and having no consideration for the wives, children, and other innocent associates of the people he intends to ruin. Most telling of his character is when he whimsically recounts how he came into possession of his mute servant. This man had been sentenced to have his tongue, hand, and head cut off on subsequent days. The Count, wanting a mute servant, specifically waited until after the tongue had been removed to ransom the man. This instance is representative of just how much of a jerk and moral degenerate the Count is.
• MINOR SPOILERS: Everything and everyone in this sprawling story seem to be connected. Many of these connections are brought about by the Count’s machinations and so make sense, but at least as many come about by complete coincidence. Like when Andrea (don’t worry who he is; he barely matters) is running from the law. He finds himself on the roof of an inn (this scene is considerably less interesting than it sounds) and goes down a chimney to escape those looking for him. And wouldn’t you know it, at complete random, he happens to pick the chimney which leads to the room his fiancé and her friend are staying in, even though he did not even know they were in this hotel. This coincidence is relatively minor to the overall plot, but many just as egregious are integral to the Count’s plans’ success. Across the book, the level of coincidence required for everything to work out as he intends approaches the absurd.
• SPOILERS: This novel is often portrayed as exploring the morality of vengeance, but I find this characterization to be overly generous. The Count cares very little for the innocent children, servants, and spouses of the conspirators he seeks vengeance on, but his actions are nearly always portrayed as morally correct. Then there is the matter of the four conspirators. In the time since the Count was imprisoned, if at least one of them had turned their life around and was a good person with a positive impact on society, Dumas could have considered the morality of revenge for past crimes versus the current conduct of a person. Instead, he neatly sidesteps this issue by making sure all four targets of the Count are awful people, providing the Count both a historic and current reason to dispose of them. There is a single attempt late in the novel to humanize the Count as he wrestles with the morality of vengeance, but the execution is very poor. It is delivered entirely via exposition, mostly by monologue, and therefore feels shoehorned in. Coming across more as an afterthought than an organic outgrowth of the story, it seems Dumas realized his protagonist has few, if any, redeeming qualities and tried to undo this damage in a few pages. In any case, it is far too little too late to inject any meaningful moral into the story. Given how Dumas ignores moral quandaries existing in the book and structures the plot in such a way as to avoid interesting questions of morality, I believe any minor effort to examine the ethics of vengeance was an afterthought at best and more likely an accident.