What I Am Reading: "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I place this book in the snooty middlebrow category of "thrillers for literati" that also happens to house some of my favorite books, such as Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language. This book was very self-consciously literary, with the main character being Lucas Corso, a "book detective" who unscrupulously acquires rare volumes for his clients. He is approached at the beginning of the story with a job to investigate the authenticity of a heretical, occult text, The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows by Aristide Torchia, of which only three copies remain. At the same time, he is also approached by a friend to authenticate a draft of a chapter from The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, that has come into his possession after the suspicious death of the owner.

I have to confess that I am a bit of a poser regarding this novel, as I have never read any Dumas. Fortunately, the novel does a lot of hand-holding through Dumas' career and writings, and he definitely makes for an interesting historical figure. As the story progresses, Corso finds himself being hunted by a man bearing a resemblance to Rochefort, the main antagonist of The Three Musketeers (and the protagonist of A Sundial in a Grave, the book I just finished; which I was initially in denial about, though I had planned to read these two swashbucklers back-to-back). Corso also finds himself in engagement with a woman resembling Milady de Winter, the Three Musketeers' femme fatale. This pursuit comes at the same time that he tracks down the other copies of the Nine Doors, as their owners die shortly after his visits. He also finds himself involved with a benevolent satanic entity. He realizes early on that some force is shaping his life to develop as if it were the pages of an adventure novel, and he resolves to conduct himself as if he were a sophisticated reader, and not as if he were the hero of a novel.

This instinct, however, betrays him in the end. I never quite understood or predicted how the two disparate story lines, Dumas and satanic ritual, were to come together, beyond a feint regarding the possibility of Dumas having sold his soul to the devil for success. In fact, the story did not come together, and the two plot lines were entirely unrelated. This development comes amidst considerable awareness by Corso that his life is unfolding as if it were on the page, though the fourth wall is not quite broken. The narrator himself is known early on as a character in the story; but he makes an unexpected reappearance at a critical juncture. Engaging on a traditional villainous monologue, he ends up having to stall for time while dealing with the book detective. Corso himself is an interesting character, amoral though not slimy, and with an enthusiasm for Napoleona and Waterloo. This reaches a climax, ironically, when a failed sexual encounter is analogized to French performance at the battle:

Very carefully he lay facedown next to her tanned, warm body waiting in the dark and used what the emperor, out on the muddy fields of Flanders, would have called an indirect-approach tactic - sizing up the terrain from the middle distance and making no contact in the critical zone. From a prudent distance he played for time in case Grouchy arrived with reinforcements; he caressed the girl and kissed her unhurriedly on the mouth and neck. But no luck. Grouchy was nowhere to be seen. The old fool was chasing Prussians miles from the battlefield. (p. 263)

The novel was originally in Spanish. I don't know a lot about Spanish literature, but it exhibits an awareness of Spain's inquisitorial past and the suppression of heresy (without beating the reader over the head with it). It also shows a bit of a detachment from World War 2: two minor characters have former Nazi affiliations, one of whom is of minor assistance to Corso (a loyal hotel concierge) and the other being blackmailed with her past. I found the former a bit jarring. The novel is also aware of its predecessors: the revelation of the Club Dumas, the harmless literary gathering behind the Dumas-related side of the story, also features a cameo by "a professor of semiotics in Bologna" who can only be Umberto Eco.

Overall, it was a fun thriller with literary window dressing, and some fun plot elements. I think that my biggest takeaway, however, was an interest in Dumas himself. I'm sure prior knowledge of his works would render a lot of winks and allusions for the dedicated fan. I have to stick to the practice of reading original texts before reading the commentary on them.