The Count of Monte Cristo

"No. I realise looking at my choices that I should have read them when I was 14. I must have read this actually when I was 16. But it’s another schoolboy book. Again the attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now. All the snooties said: “Tell a story and make money! Good God, what a terrible thing to do!” I openly tried to write a modern version of it in A Prisoner of Birth . You see, in those days, Dumas’s days, there were no blogs, nothing like that. I mean 1,700 pages! You’d never write that today. Nobody would read it. If you are writing a long novel it’s 500 pages and that’s enough, thank you very much. Today he’d be writing television scripts."

"Who hasn’t read The Count of Monte Cristo ? I spent a year on academic exchange in France and I read it then and in French. I picked it because it is a great but easy story. It begins with these huge ships, there’s a love story, there’s a betrayal, then prison and the main character meets a priest in prison who, on his death bed, tells the hero about this treasure. Our hero escapes from prison, finds the treasure and comes back as this mysterious and unimaginably wealthy gentleman to wreak his revenge upon all those who have wronged him. It’s an awesome story. There are so many versions of it in books, films, plays. I think when it was first published it was serialised in a magazine. I chose it because if you want to learn a language, then – as soon as you can – read a good story in that language. That was my first takeaway for learning a language. I actually learned it from my piano teacher, in my first lesson he started teaching me how to write music. I was surprised because I felt that it would be a while before I could write music and he said you’ve got to play with the instrument and get creative early. “Great literature is written to entertain us. Culture is for pleasure” I feel that with language it’s the same thing. We learn languages in exercise books but as soon as we can we should play with language. Primarily great literature is written to entertain us. Culture is for pleasure. So if you can find a great book, it’s a chance to have fun with a language you are learning. The Count of Monte Cristo is perfect for this since it is such a huge book by the time you’ve finished it you will understand French! If there is a lesson or a theme within The Count of Monte Cristo it is about revenge and the cost of revenge. Being careful what you wish for. The other theme is about riches and wealth and what is truly valuable. The main character spends much of the novel consumed by the need to hurt the people who hurt him. His great wealth gives him no pleasure. The thickness of the book gives you a sense of the scale of the tragedy, how much time and effort he put into plots to destroy people. Even though he had escaped from prison – he had physical freedom and the total financial freedom that the treasure afforded him – yet he still wasn’t content. I’m not sure Dumas intended it to be that deep."

"It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy is wrongly imprisoned for many years, boy escapes, discovers enormous fortune on mysterious Mediterranean island, boy exacts revenge on the people who locked him up in the first place. It was a lockdown read for me: it’s 1200 closely-typed pages, and surprisingly thrilling given how long it is. Dumas really manages to sustain great excitement for lots of the book. It’s interesting when you get these huge 19th-century authors who are writing by the pound, by the ten million words. It’s easy to be daunted by it—I think I was daunted for a long time before I read it. But then I started… At the start, Edmond Dantès is such a sweet pleasant young man; you feel for him so much when he’s unfairly locked away. It’s a complete set-up, he’s done nothing wrong. All the scenes in prison are very exciting, then he discovers this huge fortune, becomes the Count of Monte Cristo, and is rocketed into a completely different sphere of human existence. He becomes frightening. The interesting thing in the second half of the book is seeing the net being skilfully drawn tighter and tighter around the people who locked him up, who made him suffer for so many years. Dumas really skilfully creates suspense over just how far the Count is willing to go in his vengeance mission. You have the sense that everyone is being punished towards the end—but not you, the reader, because it’s very exciting. Yes, it’s really fun. Also a bit fantastical. When Dantès arrives on the mysterious island that contains the secret hole packed full of treasure, it’s insanely over-described. When he gets in there, the walls are practically coated in gold, there are chests full of treasure everywhere. It’s the fantasy of winning the EuroMillions when you haven’t even bought a ticket. It’s insane how ludicrously wealthy he suddenly becomes. The exciting thing is how he transforms huge casks of jewels and diamonds into a stable future for himself, given that he’s a nobody. He’s poor, he’s escaped from prison. If anyone finds out about this, then he’s dead. They’ll just kill him and take the money. So it’s a very exciting transformation process: he goes into the cocoon as Edmond Dantès and comes out a count. Exactly that. And Dantès is such a sweet boy, and the Count is such a cruel and distant man. It’s almost impossible to believe it’s the same person. But that sense of the complexity of wealth is in almost all novels about wealth."