Monte Cristo is the story of Edmond Dantès, falsely accused of treason and imprisoned for 15 years in the dungeons of the Chateau d'If. In prison he meets up with an abbé who tutors him on subjects far and wide and then, on his deathbed, reveals the location of an enormous treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. Shortly thereafter, Dantés escapes, finds the treasure, transforms himself into the almost superhuman Count of Monte Cristo, and travels to Paris to reek revenge on the people who imprisoned him. This revenge, of course, is duly accomplished in spectacular style.

Dumas' prose is driving and relentless, and even at 1095 pages the book seems almost too short to contain all of the characters he invents. Even more, however, France itself seems laid bare, and I found this more fascinating than the story itself. Monte Cristo is a novel of manners as much as anything else, and Dumas has a seemingly infallible sense for nearly every level of French society in the middle of the 19th century.

This is not to say that Monte Cristo is without flaws, however. The biggest by far is that the book's plot depends far too much on a long, long list of implausible coincidences. There are perhaps a dozen primary characters in the novel, and it sometimes seems as if they must comprise the entire population of France, so frequently do their paths cross. Monte Cristo is not the first novel to rely on coincidence, but there are so many and they run so deep that eventually they become hard to ignore.

Several movie versions of The Count of Monte Cristo have been made, but it really seems tailor made for a TV miniseries. It's far too expansive to be properly contained in a 2-hour film, but it has just the right cadence and depth to be perfectly told in a week's worth of 2-hour episodes. Perhaps someone will do this someday.

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