Stephen Fry is the kind of Renaissance man who inspires awe – is there anything this chap can’t do? You may know Fry from his appearances in British television programs (such as Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder) and movies (including Peter’s Friends and Wilde), but he is also an engaging novelist.
In Revenge, Fry brings the tale The Count of Monte Cristo to contemporary England, recasting the protagonist as a Ned Maddstone, young man on the cusp of entering Oxford, whose life is cruelly upended by the prank of fellow students jealous of his handsome looks, intelligence, his well-off politician of a father, and altogether perfect-seeming life.
But in a dramatic turn from the plot of Dumas’ novel, Fry crafts a cunning transformation of Ned from naïve schoolboy to world-wise cynic bent on revenge. And revenge he gets.
Fry’s portrait of Ned as a boy is thorough: we see a fresh slate, a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written upon, a casual and modest young man whose one fault is his inability to see beyond facades. His own personality is so transparent that he believes those he knows to be equally transparent, and therein lies what, for me as a reader, was the saddest “fatal flaw” to become evident in the story’s telling. As you read the thoughts and schemes of Ned’s so-called friends, you think how unfair and unjust they are, how poorly they read Ned as a person and how poorly he reads them.
Fry shows us how our faults can mislead us – the seeing people and situations they way “each wanted to believe them to be” instead of as they actually were became the ultimate cause of each man’s own demise, physical or psychological. Ned included.
I will not reveal any spoilers in this review, but urge you to read this story on its own terms, not as a strict contemporized telling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge was not the original title of this novel, but was changed only for the U.S. market. Fry’s original title for the novel was “The Stars’ Tennis Balls”, with the more apt implication that our lives are but the playthings of the gods. To assume we have any control over our ultimate ends may be folly, but it makes for a devilishly good read.
316 pp.
