THE STARS' TENNIS BALLS by Stephen Fry
Mar. 24th, 2015 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blueinkedfrost"We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded
"Which way please them" - John Webster, Duchess of Malfi Act V Scene 3
The wordplay and use of the language is unashamedly brilliant. Fry's inexhaustible pool of references and jests can't stop catching attention. This is a quick, intense read.
This is a shameless modern alternative universe of Count of Monte Cristo - a fanfic, only a fanfic that happens to be based on text long out of copyright, and fanfic written by an author with the abilities of Stephen Fry.
Prose and pacing are impressive. Plot is hollow. It's a pavlova with grand topping but not much in the shell. The novel suffers from the paradoxical flaws of taking both too much and too little from the original.
Ned Maddstone, an anagrammatical Edmond Dantès, is a public school boy with a lovely life - son of a knighted Conservative MP, captain of the Harrow eleven, about to be made Head Boy, sure of going to Oxford, and most importantly to him, in love. His beloved is Portia (derived from Mercedes - Mercedes-Benz - Porsche), a kind and intelligent young woman who's developing a love for art. Two jealous classmates and Portia's jealous cousin frame Ned for cannabis possession and distribution. Unbeknownst to the schoolboys and to Ned himself, Ned is also carrying a note from one Irish terrorist to another in his jacket - and the note happens to implicate the mother of the senior investigator. Maddstone is thus packed away to a secret Swedish mental asylum and drugged to the gills for long years, until a fellow inmate, Babe Fraser, trains him with the skills he'll need for revenge. Nedd Maddstone becomes wealthy Simon Cotter - Monte Cristo.
But where Dumas wrote elaborate scheming on Dantès' part and Mephistophelian tempting of people close to the people he wanted revenge upon, Fry's Maddstone operates on the principle of throwing enough money and other people's time at a problem until sufficient corruption is exposed to either the law or less savoury people. The second half of the book, the execution of Maddstone's revenges, is inexcusably rushed. Even when Maddstone's plots could have seemed ingenious if shown in progress, the novel skims over the story. And while it's perfectly sensible characterisation that people who are willing to frame an innocent man once will probably not stop at that crime, Fry's novel comes across as weak because of the antagonists' convenient flaws set up like ducks in a row: Rufus Cade (Caderousse) is a drug dealer involved with people who like to use machetes, Barson-Garland (Baron Danglars) likes porn of underage boys, and Gordon Fendeman (Fernand Mondego) likes raping thirteen-year-old girls.
Fry's novel tries to convey moral ambiguity over the revenge plot, but doesn't come close to Dumas' work. In the original, the Count of Monte Cristo executes his revenges step by step, starting with the least guilty (Caderousse) and intended to finish with the most (Danglars). But Dantès' second and third schemes have unexpected consequences: he's brought to change his mind about murdering Fernand Mondego's son, and he's appalled when he learns his machinations killed a child and nearly killed a friend's lover. And so the fourth scheme ends with an apology after a small amount of torture. In Fry's novel, it's Portia who expresses the cost of revenge. She understands that the man who changed to use all his money and his power to extract costs on an eye-for-an-eye rate of exchange is not the man she loved. Portia's a modern woman, better written than Mercedes, and with about the same role in the plot.
Fry's changes to the plot also alter the relative culpability of Ned's persecutors: the schoolboys believe they're framing him for a drug charge, but the Kafkaesque hell of Ned's political imprisonment is caused only by the investigator. This novel keeps the order of saving the worst revenge for last - not halted by any hesitations. It also has the effect of painting the revenge in a darker shade, even though the former schoolboys make unsympathetic victims due to the other crimes they committed in the intervening years.
(Additionally: just a little thought about the probable outcome of the schoolboys' plot if Nedd hadn't the fatal letter in his pocket will show that their idea was a stupid idea.)
There's a good sense of the inevitability of Ned Maddstone's revenge in this novel, but it's lacking in complexity.
Although Fry makes his plot less interesting by refusing to imitate Dumas' complexities and convolutions in the revenge plots, the novel also could be said to take too much from the original. The character naming scheme is interesting, but anagrams/puns/casques are not enough to sustain a novel. The fact it takes Dumas' characters but not the meaty revenge plot leaves a void. What if this book were allowed to spin off in another direction entirely? An original stuffing to this hollow frame would also have solved the lack of depth problem while it gained credit in its own right.
This book is a gripping thriller and extraordinarily well told. In truth I couldn't look away from my computer screen. But, when it was over, I realised I'd craved much more.
Alfred Bester's STARS MY DESTINATION redid Monte Cristo better.
"Which way please them" - John Webster, Duchess of Malfi Act V Scene 3
The wordplay and use of the language is unashamedly brilliant. Fry's inexhaustible pool of references and jests can't stop catching attention. This is a quick, intense read.
This is a shameless modern alternative universe of Count of Monte Cristo - a fanfic, only a fanfic that happens to be based on text long out of copyright, and fanfic written by an author with the abilities of Stephen Fry.
Prose and pacing are impressive. Plot is hollow. It's a pavlova with grand topping but not much in the shell. The novel suffers from the paradoxical flaws of taking both too much and too little from the original.
Ned Maddstone, an anagrammatical Edmond Dantès, is a public school boy with a lovely life - son of a knighted Conservative MP, captain of the Harrow eleven, about to be made Head Boy, sure of going to Oxford, and most importantly to him, in love. His beloved is Portia (derived from Mercedes - Mercedes-Benz - Porsche), a kind and intelligent young woman who's developing a love for art. Two jealous classmates and Portia's jealous cousin frame Ned for cannabis possession and distribution. Unbeknownst to the schoolboys and to Ned himself, Ned is also carrying a note from one Irish terrorist to another in his jacket - and the note happens to implicate the mother of the senior investigator. Maddstone is thus packed away to a secret Swedish mental asylum and drugged to the gills for long years, until a fellow inmate, Babe Fraser, trains him with the skills he'll need for revenge. Nedd Maddstone becomes wealthy Simon Cotter - Monte Cristo.
But where Dumas wrote elaborate scheming on Dantès' part and Mephistophelian tempting of people close to the people he wanted revenge upon, Fry's Maddstone operates on the principle of throwing enough money and other people's time at a problem until sufficient corruption is exposed to either the law or less savoury people. The second half of the book, the execution of Maddstone's revenges, is inexcusably rushed. Even when Maddstone's plots could have seemed ingenious if shown in progress, the novel skims over the story. And while it's perfectly sensible characterisation that people who are willing to frame an innocent man once will probably not stop at that crime, Fry's novel comes across as weak because of the antagonists' convenient flaws set up like ducks in a row: Rufus Cade (Caderousse) is a drug dealer involved with people who like to use machetes, Barson-Garland (Baron Danglars) likes porn of underage boys, and Gordon Fendeman (Fernand Mondego) likes raping thirteen-year-old girls.
Fry's novel tries to convey moral ambiguity over the revenge plot, but doesn't come close to Dumas' work. In the original, the Count of Monte Cristo executes his revenges step by step, starting with the least guilty (Caderousse) and intended to finish with the most (Danglars). But Dantès' second and third schemes have unexpected consequences: he's brought to change his mind about murdering Fernand Mondego's son, and he's appalled when he learns his machinations killed a child and nearly killed a friend's lover. And so the fourth scheme ends with an apology after a small amount of torture. In Fry's novel, it's Portia who expresses the cost of revenge. She understands that the man who changed to use all his money and his power to extract costs on an eye-for-an-eye rate of exchange is not the man she loved. Portia's a modern woman, better written than Mercedes, and with about the same role in the plot.
Fry's changes to the plot also alter the relative culpability of Ned's persecutors: the schoolboys believe they're framing him for a drug charge, but the Kafkaesque hell of Ned's political imprisonment is caused only by the investigator. This novel keeps the order of saving the worst revenge for last - not halted by any hesitations. It also has the effect of painting the revenge in a darker shade, even though the former schoolboys make unsympathetic victims due to the other crimes they committed in the intervening years.
(Additionally: just a little thought about the probable outcome of the schoolboys' plot if Nedd hadn't the fatal letter in his pocket will show that their idea was a stupid idea.)
There's a good sense of the inevitability of Ned Maddstone's revenge in this novel, but it's lacking in complexity.
Although Fry makes his plot less interesting by refusing to imitate Dumas' complexities and convolutions in the revenge plots, the novel also could be said to take too much from the original. The character naming scheme is interesting, but anagrams/puns/casques are not enough to sustain a novel. The fact it takes Dumas' characters but not the meaty revenge plot leaves a void. What if this book were allowed to spin off in another direction entirely? An original stuffing to this hollow frame would also have solved the lack of depth problem while it gained credit in its own right.
This book is a gripping thriller and extraordinarily well told. In truth I couldn't look away from my computer screen. But, when it was over, I realised I'd craved much more.
Alfred Bester's STARS MY DESTINATION redid Monte Cristo better.
