Overview
Edmond Dantes is falsely imprisoned, escapes, discovers a treasure, and returns as the Count of Monte Cristo to exact elaborate revenge.
Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo in serial form between 1844 and 1846, collaborating with Auguste Maquet on plot construction. The novel — about Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for fourteen years and then returning as the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo to exact elaborate revenge on his betrayers — is one of the great revenge novels and one of the great plot novels in any language.
Key Ideas
Patience and Planning
Great achievements require immense patience and strategic thinking.
The Cost of Revenge
The pursuit of retribution may harm the avenger as much as the guilty.
Hope and Resilience
Refusing to surrender to despair is the ultimate testament to human will.
Who should read this
Readers who want a long, propulsive adventure novel that never lets up. The Count of Monte Cristo is almost 1,300 pages in its unabridged form, and it uses every one of them — Dumas's plotting is ingenious and his pacing, despite the length, unrelenting. Probably the most entertaining nineteenth-century novel still in print.
Who might skip it
Skip only if the abridged versions have put you off — many English editions trim the book heavily, and the full version is a different experience. Skip also if you dislike novels of revenge; Monte Cristo is a book in which elaborate payback is the engine of the entire story.
The verdict
One of the most purely pleasurable long novels I have read. Dumas is not a stylist in the Flaubert sense, but he is a magnificent engineer of plot, and the accumulation of revenges in the book's second half is one of the great structural achievements in popular fiction. Read the Robin Buss translation (Penguin); many older English versions are heavily cut.
"All human wisdom is contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
If you liked this
The Three Musketeers for Dumas's other major novel. The Black Tulip for his shorter historical work.