The Club Dumas

Note: This review assumes you have read the book. If you haven’t, but still want to read the review, feel free. But it might not make a lot of sense.

The Club Dumas is a book about books. More specifically, it’s a book about tricky self-referential books that play with readers.

On the very first page, author Arturo Perez-Reverte starts playing with the reader’s expectations by saying "novels are written by Roger Ackroyd’s doctor". This is a reference to Agatha Christie’s landmark The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which stretched the boundaries of whodunits by having the murderer turn out to be the narrator. The narrator was, of course, Roger Ackroyd’s doctor.

If the author thinks the reader will get the reference, he’s setting up an expectation that Boris Balkan will turn out to be the murderer. Much later, Balkan explains:

"It was you who filled in the blanks on their own, as if what happened were a novel based on trickery, with Lucas Corso the reader too clever for his own good. Nobody ever told you that things were actually as you thought. No, the responsibility is entirely yours, my friend. The real villain in the piece is your excessive intertextual reading and linking of literary references." (p.334)

The argument presented is that it’s not Perez-Reverte’s fault if the reader went off on his own and decided that Balkan must be a murderer before there was even a murder for Balkan to have committed. This argument is similar to the argument that was presented after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: It’s not Agatha Christie’s fault if the reader forgot about the narrator; it’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody in the book – after all, the narrator didn’t actually lie about events! In fact, the "murder" at the beginning of the book is really a suicide, as Balkan implies immediately berfore the Christie reference. But the book comes from the "Mystery" section, which, again, sets up certain expectations for the reader.

A few paragraphs later, Balkan softens the message a little:

"The information a book provides is an objective given. It may be presented by a malevolent author who wishes to mislead, but it is never false. It is the reader who makes a false reading." (p.335)

The next chapter title, "A Device Worthy of a Gothic Novel", ends the complicated self-referential metafictional part of the book, presumably because Perez-Reverte felt he’d made his point.

However, for all the talk of "malevolent authors", this author clearly enjoys his literary references. The Club Dumas is about people whose lives are books. In addition to the ubiquitous Dumas references, there’s the Christie references (a quote begins Chapter V: "Remember". I think I could probably defend that chapter title as a reference to the concept of references), Umberto Eco references (besides the references to his books, Eco himself appears as a character, in the Club itself, when Balkan says "Look who's arrived. You know him, don't you? Professor of Semiotics in Bologna..." (p. 323)), and generalized literary references. Perez-Reverte even includes in one of the book collections a book written by one of his own characters, the protagonist of The Fencing Master.

Balkan and Corso talk of great opening lines, mentioning the opening of, among others, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. And so on. It’s a shame in this respect that the opening line of The Club Dumas isn’t particularly memorable.

The story that Balkan is in is thus a story about literary references and assumptions and so on. Now that The Ninth Gate has come out, even more people will come into the story assuming that Balkan is the villain, even though Balkan’s plot has actually been entirely removed from the movie.

In The Ninth Gate, Corso’s journey through the movie parallels the penitent’s journey through the woodcuts in the Nine Gates book. Several of the pictures are changed, particularly the eighth woodcut. In The Club Dumas, it portrays a young man with a sword about to behead a kneeling woman. In the movie, it portrays an old man (drawn to look like Balkan) about to whack a kneeling man (Corso) with a mace. Corso is looking at this picture when he gets knocked on the back of the head in the Baroness’s library in the movie.

This discussion has gotten somewhat sidetracked so I’ll close it here. I’ll just mention that Creepy Girl, named "Irene Adler" in the book, possibly because Irene Adler was Sherlock Holmes’ Adversary (and another name for Satan is "the Adversary", you see – I realize this isn’t a hundred percent convincing), is either the Devil or a minion of the Devil in both the book an the movie. And she’s reading How To Win Friends and Influence People in the movie.