Title: "The Count of Monte Cristo"
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Editor: David Coward
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Note: True to Oxford's well deserved reputation, this edition contains a thorough introduction, select bibliography, and biography of Dumas. In this reviewer's humble opinion, Oxford sets the standard for literature publishing, especially their annotated or critical editions.  The cultural, biographical, and textual notes are without peer, perhaps excepting Norton and Cambridge. Unless one is extremely familiar with the text and context of a work, I would recommend avoiding non-annotated titles, especially in classic works. 
Pages: 1,095 (no, that is not a typo...)
Setting: Early 19th century France and the Mediterranean, during the turbulent times of Napoleon's first and second empires, and the re-establishment of French royalty. 

Plot: Edmond Dantes, a young officer on the merchant ship Pharaon, returns to Marseilles, France, anticipating his marriage to his faithful sweetheart, Mercedes.  On the day of his wedding, he is falsely accused of and arrested for treason, the unwitting and innocent victim of a conspiracy of three supposed "friends", or at least acquaintances (an insanely jealous cousin of his fiancée, an ambitious and envious junior officer aboard the Pharaon, and a spineless, greedy, and unscrupulous local inn-keeper). Consigned indefinitely to the dank dungeons of the  infamous Chateau D'If by a ruthless local magistrate seeking to capitalize on the royalist hysteria over Bonapartist sympathizers, Dantes meets and is mentored and educated by a fellow prisoner, an unjustly imprisoned abbe. 
    After fourteen abysmal years, Dante escapes and retrieves an immense treasure hidden by the abbe on the bleak, uninhabited Mediterranean island, Monte Cristo.  Subsequent to several world-wide exciting adventures, Dantes returns to France as the fabulously wealthy Count of Monte Cristo, with the sole purpose, as (in his own mind) the hand of providence - the angel of God, to wreak vengeance on the four men who ruined his life and his happiness. 
    He of course succeeds, through his brilliant, single-minded, and merciless actions.  One is murdered, another commits suicide, one goes wildly insane, and the fourth is financially and physically ruined.  Now permanently - and sadly - estranged from his former sweetheart, the Count sails off into the sunset with his adoring and faithful soul mate, a young lady that in the course of his many adventures he had saved and befriended.
 
Recommendation: "The Count of Monte Cristo" is approved for use by GCS students with certain specific qualifications.  The vocabulary, many twists and turns of the plot, adult themes, and sheer length of Monte Cristo render this book far above the level of all but the most advanced students.  In addition, parents should read at least the introduction before approving this book for their children. 
 
The obvious question arises, "Why in the world would I recommend a long, secular book replete with murder, suicide, infanticide, conspiracy, greed, avarice, and even adultery?"  Good question.  The key to the affirmative answer lies in the brilliance of the author, the supreme story-teller, Alexandre Dumas.  Through his protagonist-hero, the Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas exposes the hypocrisy, duplicity and moral turpitude of the nineteenth century French aristocracy.  Monte Cristo, as stated above, ruins each of his four adversaries... without lifting a finger against them, but instead by cleverly manipulating circumstances and events to expose their base, vile natures hidden under a facade of French high culture. 

    The murdered man is assassinated by a fellow thief who turns on his partner-in crime after a thwarted attempted burglary of Monte Cristo's mansion.  The suicide is a decorated general who is publicly discovered to have falsely earned his military decorations - and fortune - by treacherously and cravenly betraying his superior to the enemy.  The madman (the book's best rendition of a biblical Pharisee) goes insane after being exposed publicly - in the midst of prosecuting a capital criminal case - as the illegitimate natural father of the defendant (whom he abandoned as dead while in infancy), and after his wife has taken the lives of her young son and herself via poison.  And finally, the financially and physically ruined conspirator is ruined by his own avaricious over-speculation. 

    Carefully read, studied, and taught, Monte Cristo will be discovered to contain a plethora of biblical lessons and principles, especially if analyzed hand in hand with the book of Proverbs, and even some of the histories of the kings of Israel and Judah.
    One other extremely significant factor recommends this book (again, with the above-mentioned qualifications).  Even as Dumas brilliantly exposes the tawdry depravity of the highest levels of French society, the reader will discover "Monte Cristo" totally devoid of graphic sex, violence, profanity, and similar crass and crude "adult" material that proliferates most modern trashy check-stand "novels".  As difficult as it may be to comprehend, all of the questionable material is handled with extremely tasteful discretion - inference as opposed to explicitness.  (This is one defining mark of a "classic".)

    The action and story line of Monte Cristo is simultaneously gripping and challenging. (Again, Dumas is a brilliant story teller.) With near Dickensian precision and even deeper mystery, a multitude of well-developed and complex characters in Monte Cristo appear and disappear, only to reappear much later and greatly enhance the plot.  In addition, Monte Cristo offers a historically accurate and detailed panorama of French society, culture, and manners.   Reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a challenging enterprise, not suited for the timid of heart and intellectually indolent, but well worth the diligence required to see it through to the end. 
 
 
Tom Chaffin
Grace Community School