There is a conversation in The Club Dumas - I forget at the moment between which characters - where one of the speakers wonders whether Alexandre Dumas might have been in cahoots with The Prince of Darkness. This would then explain the phenomenal success, both immediate and long-term, that his fictions received. This juxtaposition of the occult with the work of Dumas is brought up a few more times in the novel, and though it isn’t pursued with any serious scholarship, it does illustrate the feeling of magic that one experiences in Dumas’ stories.
Reading Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, there is no doubt that the author, too, has experienced Dumas’ magic, and admires the virtuosity of this 19th century serial writer. Beyond its titular reference, the book abounds with information about Dumas and his vast repertoire, covering the man himself, the period he wrote in, and the background of some of his books. The plot, too, is a nod to Dumas, with its intrigue, rapid turn of events, and characters that appear to have stepped straight out of The Three Musketeers, and into this 20th century work.
This wealth of information is The Club Dumas’ greatest strength. More than anything else in the novel, the literary history of Dumas, and other subjects, is fascinating to follow, and keeps the pages turning. Most of this information is imparted through conversations that Lucas Corso, tough-guy loner cum book finder, has with various authorities on literature, making the learning experience a dynamic one. Perez-Reverte obviously did a lot of research for the writing of this novel, and he works it into the narrative with admirable skill.
Yet for all the respect that Perez-Reverte fosters for 19th century serial fiction, his own novel only flirts with the genre’s strengths, borrowing weak imitations of the plot and character that made these novels so readable. It then mixes this diluted transfusion with a contemporary formula that juggles narrative voice, teases the barrier between reader and character, and experiments with literary convention. The result of this exercise is a literary Frankenstein that succeeds only modestly in the task of telling a story.
Which brings me back to the idea that Dumas might have dabbled in dark powers. As absurd as it may be, the idea touches upon the fact that Dumas’ accomplishments are so extraordinary as to seemingly lie beyond the ken of mere mortal artists. His novels had that rare combination of public success and artistic merit, while his productivity was simply astounding. The entire Musketeer saga - spanning well over 3,000 pages - was finished in less than two years, and quickly followed by more work of the same caliber, such as The Count of Monte Cristo.
The question inevitably arises: how did Dumas do it? One of the answers is that he employed collaborators - or ghost writers, depending upon the authority - who supplied the background for his stories. In the case of the Musketeers saga, this person was Auguste Maquet, another historical fiction writer who failed to make a name through his own work. Although it is not known how much of the final prose in the Musketeers saga was exclusively Dumas’, the general consensus is that Maquet provided the basic outline, and historical consistency.
With this in mind, I can’t help but liken Perez-Reverte’s work in The Club Dumas to that which Maquet must have done in his collaboration with Dumas. This is not to say that Perez-Reverte is a bad writer, or, to use the parlance of our times, a hack. Rather, the comparison is meant to illustrate the absence in The Club Dumas of that certain, literary genius that makes a novel like The Three Musketeers such a masterpiece of fiction.
If contemporary understanding of Dumas and his work is to be believed, then it was Maquet who built the framework of the novels, while Dumas added the finishing touch that made these books masterpieces. So too, does Perez-Reverte have the makings of a competent novel in The Club Dumas, only in this case, that final, magic touch is absent from the completed whole. Throughout the novel, many characters extol the virtues of 19th century adventure fiction, yet the story that they themselves inhabit fails to attain the same level of greatness, or, for that matter, adventure.
Part of this failure lies in the format that Perez-Reverte chose for The Club Dumas. The novel begins in the first person, as told by the narrator, Boris Balkan, before moving into the third person, where it deals with the vicissitudes of Lucas Corso. Twice more, Boris Balkan reappears as the narrator, jumping back into the fold with a conspicuous ‘I’ that completely interrupts the narrative. These stumbling points beg the question: whose story is more important, Corso’s, or the narrator’s?
For most of the novel, it seems to be Corso’s, as he follows his latest assignment, tracking down two other copies of a rare occult work with an extremely long title. The narrative takes on the tone of a Detective novel, and indeed, there are moments where the intrigue is fairly deep, and The Club Dumas seems like it is shaping up to be a literary thriller along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The aforementioned connections between Dumas and the occult are put forth, and the novel gathers momentum for a conclusion that promises to shed light on all of its mysteries.
Herein lies the other part of the novel’s failure: its under-whelming conclusion. All sense of mystery comes to a crashing halt in the penultimate chapter, where the narrator makes his final appearance, and explains everything to Corso. Only, it turns out that his explanation has no connection to the occult, and very little to the strange events Corso experienced throughout the story. When Corso confronts Boris Balkan with this lack of fulfillment, the narrator shrugs these questions away. “My story was the serial. You’ll have to look for the crime novel elsewhere.”
Some readers may experience a thrill when they come across such blatant in-story analysis; meanwhile, I was left with a sense of disappointment, coupled with frustration. After all of the praise heaped upon classic adventure fiction, this novel turns out to be an intertextual, dare-I-say postmodern, experiment. All of the tantalizing connections that Corso drew between Dumas, the occult, and the events around him, were merely in his head. He saw complexity only because he was looking for it.
Even more galling is Boris Balkan’s claim that “it was you who filled in the blanks on your own, as if what happened were a novel based on trickery, with Lucas Corso the reader to clever for his own good. Nobody ever told you that things were actually as you thought. No, the responsibility is yours, my friend. The real villain of the piece is your excessive intertextual reading and linking of literary references.”
Somehow, the narrator is claiming the right to absolve himself from being responsible for whatever impressions the reader experiences while reading his story. Yet the narrator introduced himself as the teller of this story, and even assured his audience that, in those parts where he moved into the background, he retained enough knowledge of what followed to remain an authority on the events that followed. How then can he claim to have nothing to do, whatsoever, with a reader’s impressions? Is this his story, or isn’t it?
Perhaps some readers are smiling, and giggling to themselves while thinking, “That’s the whole point of the exercise! Where does the reader take over after the writer has begun?” My answer to that question has always been a straightforward one: the reader picks up the story after it has been written, printed, published, and sold. The writer’s task is to tell the story, while the reader should be thankful that they are able to experience it. Any literary sleight-of-hand that plays with narrative, and questions the dimensions of a text, is nothing more than that: a literary gimmick that substitutes trickery for story-telling.
As far as looking for answers to the rest of the novel’s mysterious events, there is but a single chapter left to do so. Nor does this last chapter, with its pompous title, accomplish much of anything. All of the fascinating background about occult writers, and their quest to get in touch with the ultimate source of dark power, culminates in a ceremony that is laughably cliché, and best described as ‘cheesy.’ Appropriately enough, Corso witnesses the perpetrator of this camp destroying a host of rare, classic works of the occult, the kind that he makes his living locating, and safeguarding.
This straightforward metaphor perfectly captures the essence of The Club Dumas: it places classic works of adventure fiction on a well-earned pedestal, and then attempts to wow the audience with literary gimmickry and post-modern breakdancing moves. As much as Perez-Reverte admires the old-fashioned formula that makes these novels so popular, it seems that he is not up to the task of employing it successfully in his own work. Instead, he belongs firmly to the school of wide-eyed readers who look at the accomplishments of their ancestors, and shy away from any attempt to match them.
In his last appearance, the narrator laments “these times of mediocrity and lack of imagination . . . times in which people no longer admire marvels, as theater audiences and the readers of serials used to. They hissed at the villains and cheered on the heroes with no inhibitions.”
I assure you, Boris Balkan, that when you unveiled the mediocrity of The Club Dumas, I hissed without any inhibition, whatsoever.
