Tuesday , March 19 2024
Pick up The Club Dumas and be reminded of the reasons for reading...

Book Review: The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

It's the middle of the night when your contact phones. He has selected a particularly out of the way, perhaps a little too out of the way, site. Carefully you prepare yourself to sneak out to your clandestine meeting, ensuring you have to hand the resources supplied by your client. Twice you suspect someone has tailed you to the rendezvous, but you know that can't be possible. Who could be on to you? Only your client and the contact know about this so unless one of them are playing a double game, there shouldn't be anyone there. You're jumping at shadows you tell yourself.

He's exactly where he says he would be, a small shop on the Left Bank in Paris specializing in the kind of antiquities for which people like your client would pay a fortune. For 15 badly hand-written pages of foolscap that has seen better days, you hand over the agreed amount and scurry off into the night with the papers secreted in the depths of your bag. The adrenaline is only now starting to dissipate as you have yet again negotiated the paths needed to walk through the mysteries of the antiquarian book world. You won't breathe easily until you've handed the pages of manuscript to your client, but the worst is over now. The buy has been successfully negotiated.

If you've never thought of the world of antiquarian books as being something that could inspire passion, betrayal, and even murder, The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte will open the casket lid on a hither-to unknown world of skullduggery, academia, bibliophiles, and mystery. You will be drawn into a world full of arcane knowledge relating to authorship, bindings, publications, engravings, and forgery that is the backdrop for one of the finest literary mysteries ever written.

The story revolves around Lucas Corso, a book detective for hire. His clients, the rich, famous and infamous, hire him to track down rare titles, investigate a manuscript's provenance, or to act as the intermediary in a sale. His only loyalties are to the books and the money he is paid by his client to procure them. Like all good mercenaries he could one day be working for you, aiding your efforts to buy a rare second printing with a misspelling, and the next you'll find he has been there an hour before you securing the rights to first refusal for an estate sale of books.

As the title suggests, The Club Dumas focuses upon a particular work of Alexandra Dumas, most famous for his novels concerning the adventures of the Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan. But it's not merely a rare edition of The Three Musketeers that is the focus of Corso's attentions. No, he's been asked to verify the authenticity of 14 pages of handwritten manuscript purporting to be part of the original serialization by Dumas.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Doyle, Dickens, and others, Dumas wrote in weekly installments for newspapers and an adoring public. As we follow Corso around from Spain, to Portugal, and to France, we not only learn a little bit more about the manuscript and Dumas himself, but the nature of the man who is carrying it. Is he as cynical and manipulative as our narrator would have us believe (the narrator is a character in the book who crosses over the literary "fourth wall" periodically to play a featured role), caring only for the pieces of silver he receives at the end of the day? Or does his encyclopedic knowledge of books and their intricacies come from some place deeper inside of him?

Hung on the wall of his apartment is a memento to his romantic nature, a saber carried by some long-ago relative who fought at Waterloo with Napoleon against Wellington. (Could Corso be a diminutive honouring Napoleon's birth land of Corsica?) He will recreate the battle in miniature at home, with the French troops victorious as Marshall Ney makes the charge that would have broken the English line. In reality he was too little too late in the battle that shaped the fate of Europe for the next 100 years or more.

Does his endless reenactment of history with the ending changed reflect his own feelings of regret over opportunities missed? How much does his own history affect his decisions over the course of the book? When an author is able to plant these questions in your mind like Perez does with his Corso, it goes a long way towards explaining a character's motivations.

Corso himself is as much part of the mystery to be solved for the reader, as are the two manuscripts he carries with him. (Give me a second; I'll get to the second one.) While Perez has the events of the story solve the obvious literary mysteries, we are left on our own to solve the puzzle of his protagonist.

The second manuscript sends Corso on a quest. While the Dumas fragment is seemingly a simple matter of verifying its authenticity, the same can't be said for his other assignment. There are only three known copies of The Nine Doors in existence. A famous book of the occult written in the 1600s, its printer was burned at the stake, and all other copies of the text that could be located were committed to the flames.

Supposedly the illustrations in the book hold the key for summoning the Devil. A client of Corso's has managed to lay hands upon a copy, and asks Corso to compare it to the two known authentic copies in existence in an attempt to verify the authenticity of his own. But as Corso traipses around Europe with these two texts in his luggage, things start to happen and events spiraling out of his control.

Who is the mysterious man with the scar who keeps appearing on the periphery of his sight no matter what town he is in? Who is the strange young woman who attaches herself to Corso claiming she is there to protect him? Protect him from what and from whom he wonders?

He should wonder, because he is starting to leave a trail of bodies and damaged books behind him. He manages to get in and visit with each of the two owners of the other copies of The Nine Doors and compare the texts. But within 24 hours of him being their guest, both are dead and their copy of the text has been burnt, minus the nine engravings. Those had been removed prior to the books' destruction.

Corso had already deduced that there were minor differences in some of the engravings from book to book. What is the significance of those differences, and why has the murderer destroyed the text but retained the engravings? Is Corso at risk of the same thing happening to him? Is that why the man with the scar is following him? What, if any, connection is there between the Dumas manuscript and The Nine Doors?

These are the mysteries Corso is faced with as he races across Europe looking to such diverse sources of help as the text of the The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes and his powers of deduction, and two of the finest book-forgers in Europe. All the while he is forced to stay under cover as he is now under suspicion for the murders of the two late owners of The Nine Doors.

The Club Dumas is not just a mystery story, or a tale of the occult, although it can be read as either; it is also an appreciation for a genre of literature that has fallen by the wayside in our cynical age of realism and technology. The adventure stories of the 19th century with their swashbuckling, romantic heroes have been relegated to the lower rungs of literature as the ages have passed.

It is not surprising that the man who has given us the memorable character of Captain Alatriste could have written this remarkable story, which is not only a page-turner in terms of plot and intrigue, but a treatise on the worth of those stories that still could excite our passions and fire our imaginations if we would only let them.

Read The Club Dumas because it is well-written and filled with memorable characters and not only will you find yourself embroiled in a great mystery story, but will also be reminded of the reasons for reading: the stirring of the imagination, the excitement of adventure, the enchantment of a story, and the escape from reality all books once offered.

About Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of three books commissioned by Ulysses Press, "What Will Happen In Eragon IV?" (2009) and "The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion" and "Introduction to Greek Mythology For Kids". Aside from Blogcritics he contributes to Qantara.de and his work has appeared in the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and has been translated into numerous languages in multiple publications.

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