The Club Dumas
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas’s masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer’s trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.
There is a strange magic that exists within the pages of a novel that is about books and literary life, something compelling and fresh yet familiar in ways bibliophiles understand. History through the yellowed pages of a rare edition, focusing not just on the history of a manuscript’s story but of the physical piece itself—the age, the printer, the illustrations and what these choices mean within the world of rare books. It’s history you can touch, these books of the past. To read a novel focused on such things—books about books—is something of a rare treat. With such thoughts on my mind, The Club Dumas was a novel I had hoped to love.
The Club Dumas is, ultimately, a novel of fantastic foundations and fascinating subjects that simply does not live up to its own potential. With a plot that revolves around verifying a chapter of The Three Musketeers potentially handwritten by Dumas himself and the discovery of a book (and two more editions) rumored to have been written by the Devil himself, there were elements of this story that I found irresistibly intriguing and exciting. Corso’s hunt for these books opened doors to discussion of the ancient and forbidden—occultism, demonology, witchcraft–and the relentless search for answers to dark, supernatural questions that have plagued men through the centuries and ended in death for so many. The foundation of The Club Dumas is so rich in potential and atmosphere, but so much of this reading experience came off as predictable and trite. While the intriguing literary and historical elements drove the plot and characters, they did so in ways that didn’t match my expectations for a book of such intrigue, instead using familiar and predictable mystery/thriller tropes and archetypes as the actual foundation of the plot’s structure. As the mysteries of the Dumas manuscript moved along, it felt like readers’ attention (and Corso’s) was being more consistently pulled to the Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows—a forbidden book that supposedly holds the key to summoning the Devil—Corso’s hunt for it, and the secrets it could reveal. Though I can’t be anything but vague without risking spoilers, there is something to be said for the balance of where readers’ attention was pulled as the plot unfolded, especially when it read as if things were just unfolding a specific way because they had to in order to fit a script. There is a cleverness to The Club Dumas’s structure and execution, but it’s a cleverness that only makes me wish it had delivered more impact. The driving forces behind the plot came to their conclusions, but in a way I found unsatisfying. It felt like the answers to the mysteries that had been building up for the entirety of the novel were just suddenly handed to readers on a silver platter. By the end of the novel, one of the plot threads—the most interesting one in my opinion—felt like it had only been there to distract readers from the overall direction of another plot thread. It came to an abrupt conclusion, without clearly answering questions that had been dredged up for readers, but lacking the interesting sense of ambiguity that can make such an ending worthwhile and satisfying.
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Much of The Club Dumas’s mediocrity stems from the writing and its characters. While the writing was generally decent, it lacked the prose that could’ve made this story something richer, though I’m not sure how much of that could be due to it being a translation. The subject matter—rare books, secret knowledge, murder, occultism—begs for thoughtful, evocative prose that feels both hushed and decadent, a secret to be kept. Instead, The Club Dumas was written with a fairly straightforward hand, lacking the tone and atmosphere that could’ve elevated this story exponentially. The characters were largely underwhelming, written relatively simply and made to fit into archetypes readers are familiar with. Character descriptions were irritatingly repetitive, as if there were only a few descriptors that could be used per character. Corso was “wolflike.” Irene was boyish with tanned skin and green eyes that were focused on far too much. While Corso filled the role of “lone wolf detective” fairly normally, some of the secondary characters often went beyond archetypal and felt borderline cartoonish. This felt like both an issue of the characters themselves and the writing. More specifically, the author’s inability to write believable, nuanced characters. One character was especially irritating—essentially a caricature, so poorly written with overdone, ridiculous descriptions and characterization that was frustrating. The fact that the two women within the story were constantly focused on for their physical appearances was irritating, made more so by the fact that Corso’s interactions with them were predictable and disappointing. One woman seemed like an excuse to write a poorly conceived, very specific stereotypical type of male-written female character who is focused on and praised throughout the narrative for certain physical and behavioral qualities, but overall forms a character designed to be enjoyed by male readers for physical descriptions and simultaneously easily dismissed for being that type of woman. It was ridiculous. Another character made me question why they were there at all. How did they actually affect the story? What was the point of insinuating certain things about them when they had so little impact? Readers don’t even understand what their motivation might’ve been. It was a too-vague, frustrating element of an already predictable and trite situation.
Within The Club Dumas’s final pages, revelations came to light that made me question every opinion I’d had in terms of both plot and characters and, consequently, the author’s skill. Everything suddenly needed to be viewed slightly differently. This was a neat little trick, one that I can admire and see the clever intelligence in, but it doesn’t necessarily excuse the fact that for much of the novel, I wasn’t enraptured by the story or its characters and didn’t enjoy it all that much. It was intriguing, but never fully engrossing. Though I was invested in the overall focus and themes of the story, at no point was I absolutely desperate to keep reading in order to untangle the mystery. While the subject matter ensured The Club Dumas wasn’t a run-of-the-mill story, it unfolded in a very much run-of-the-mill way, peppered with irritating descriptions and archetypal characters that weighed it down.
The Club Dumas has its own intelligence about it, something bigger in the framework that could be used to explain and excuse many of the elements I disliked. Though there’s something to be admired about the layering of the focus on Dumas within the story and I can see why some readers may look at it and think of nothing but how clever the author is, I was disappointed by the overall impact of the story, its writing, and the plot. Some of the ideas are great; I would’ve loved to see them explored in a book or two by an author more to my own taste. The Club Dumas was entertaining, but not what I had hoped it would be. As I said, there is a strange magic that exists within the pages of a novel that is about books and literary life—but only when done right.