Tunneling Out of the Chateau d'If

I vaguely remember reading a story some years ago about a race of people—it may have been the Neanderthals in the Thursday Next series—who utterly abhorred fiction, but loved reading facts. Dry facts. The drier the better. If you came to their house in the evenings, you might find them reading an automotive repair manual, or a guide to the farming of wheat. Why waste your time trying to imagine things that never actually happened?

That’s how I feel at the moment, which is why I’ve been reading The Count of Monte Cristo with voracious interest for the last few days. It is like a parable from God—a parable of faith. The great themes of the story are much more explicit in the novel than in my beloved film adaptation. In the novel, the Abbé Faria tells anyone who will listen that he has a fabulous treasure worth millions which he’s willing to lavish in all its abundance on the first person who will let him out of his cell. Each of the governors and deputies who visits the prison comes away thinking he’s mad.

But Edmond believes him. Edmond becomes his adopted son. Edmond breaks out of prison and travels to the island where the treasure is supposedly hidden. And there he becomes richer than any man alive.

Edmond believed; Edmond acted. It’s hard to imagine a more moving demonstration of faith. That treasure was available all along for anyone who wanted it; but only one person believed. And his confidence propelled him to act, and he became a different man. The story of Edmond’s transformation in the prison from naïve and illiterate young sailor to a man of intelligence, command, and charisma has numinous power. It’s like a vibrant stone which never stops radiating its own perfection. You can draw from it again and again. Such is the power of myth.

Some of the set pieces emblazon themselves on the memory with the vividness of an unforgettable sunrise:

Little by little, the wind subsided. Westwards across the sky rolled huge grey clouds which seemed to have been discoloured by the storm. Patches of blue sky reappeared with stars that shone brighter than ever. Soon, in the east, a long reddish band lit up the undulating blue-black line on the horizon. The waves danced and instantly a light sped across their crests; transforming each one into a mane of gold. Day was breaking.

Dantés remained motionless and silent before this great spectacle, as if seeing it for the first time. Indeed, in all the years that he had been at the Chateau d’If he had forgotten it. He turned back to look at the fortress, sweeping his eyes across the whole arc of the land and the sea. The dark pile rose out of the midst of the waves with the imposing majesty common to all motionless objects which seem at once to watch and to command.

This is much more than just an interesting visual description of daybreak. We feel it all the more deeply because it’s the first hint of sunlight the novel has given in hundreds of pages. And the whole span of waiting that precedes it connects us with Edmond at the level of the heart. He, like the reader, has earned this sunrise.

It is a suffering which makes the transformation in his character all the more believable and haunting:

‘Monsieur,’ Caderousse said, nervously holding out one hand, while the other wiped the sweat that was beading on his brow, ‘Oh, Monsieur, do not jest with a man’s happiness and despair!’

‘I know what happiness is, and what is despair, and I never just with feelings.’

There’s an unforced confidence and dignity in all the Count’s actions which is central to the whole substance of the story. It’s one of the few aspects of the novel which the recent movie adaptation got absolutely right. And I suppose it was this which I secretly coveted in all my first adventures.

I think, at last, I may be finding it.

God's Piano

[[ or, "You Really Want Adventures, Taylor?" ]]

[ Sunday, January 9, 2005. Southwestern ]

“How was your break?” he asked me.

“It was decent,” I lied. “We had a record snow on Christmas morning. It was the first time there had been snow in the area since 1994. The whole yard was covered in two feet of snow. But I’m glad to be back. I really missed the place while I was gone.”

“Me, too,” said Taylor. “I was ready to come back.”

“Did you have a good break?”

“Yeah, it was mostly really good.” He stood up from his desk and a light came into his eyes, as if a switch had just been flipped at the back of his mind. Taylor had eyes like the sea; they were sometimes tranquil, sometimes turbulent, but gazing into them you had a sense of deeper mysteries at work beneath the surface of which even he himself was unaware.

“Mostly?” I asked him. “What did you do?”

“Oh, I went on meditative walks alone,” he said, “in solitude through empty fields blown by the sleeping wind; lying on my back in the grass on a hillside above a small lake, reciting poetry under a lonely pine and hiking through dense woods and wading in rushing spring streams. It was like being a kid again. I missed my sleepy little train-stop town. God! I’m such a dreamer, Boze,” he admitted sadly, tossing a pillow to the floor so he could sit beside me on the couch. “I just… I want to do something! I want to throw it all away and just do something! I have these irresistible urges where I want to skip school and just wander around, experiencing LIFE! I want to make the memories I’ll look back on when I’m older and tell stories!”

He stood up from the couch and started pacing through the room. When Taylor and I were restless, we would often pace together, though, as he was vastly taller than I was, this inevitably suggested some maniacal and charismatic villain from a movie plotting mischief with his ugly, lesser henchman.

Anyone who has lived long enough has had the experience of seeing one specific face which utterly surpassed all others. It is an experience one is unlikely ever to forget. Yet such a face was Taylor’s. There was something regal in it: teeth of an unspotted whiteness, shaggy, mane-like hair, a gently-sloping nose, a neatly-trimmed brown beard, and moody, ever-shifting, rain-blue eyes. He had more than once been likened to the Count of Monte Cristo in the Jim Caviezel film, and in fact there was something a little uncanny in the resemblance, as if all my sentimental and elusive dreams of manhood had arrayed themselves in flesh. What I could only ever hope to be, he WAS. I had never in my life met anyone as fully, unashamedly alive as he. He had a heart full of thunder and glory. Alex and I were but the moons which orbited around him. When he strode into a room, people stared. When he spoke, they listened. When he translated the substance of his moody meditativeness into music, and for hours in the Bishop’s lounge outside the Commons rendered the vivid landscape of his deepest feelings on the canvas of night, until a melancholy trance seemed to seize him and he left the muddy confines of the earth to wander in the pure white radiance of ivory dreams, a spell would fall on anyone who listened and in silence we became aware of a second, still subtler music underlying Taylor’s and yet interwoven with it in a song of perfect consonance. It was God’s piano; it was God’s emotions. It was the violently tender exclamation of His passions on the instruments of time.

“I want to do things people don’t think about!” he shouted, stroking his beard with one hand even as he flung the other high into the air. “I want to travel, to walk about aimlessly… no destination! I want to be an explorer in the uncharted territory of my own life! I want drama, Boze. Where there is no drama, there is no story to be told. My life is filled with empty pages, emotionless, cold, empty, devoid of activity. I wish… for once I just wish we knew a single good woman! Think of the stories we could tell, the adventures we could have…”