Customer Reviews

Revenge: A Novel

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4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ned Maddstone has it all, or at least enough to make him feel reasonably confident about his prospects: a wealthy father in the government, a fifth-generation place waiting for him at Oxford, and a girlfriend who considers herself "the luckiest, happiest, most dementedly in-love girl in the world" because of him. He's also Head Boy at his English prep school, a position likely to make an enemy or two, whether today or in 1980 when the book opens. After Ned commits a small, but not easily forgiven offense against a classmate, a simple prank to defame him coincides with a much greater secret service operation and he ends up locked in a psychiatric hospital for the better part of two decades.

Bereft of human contact for much of that time, except for that of his captors, Ned forgets who he is until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a fellow patient named Babe. A crusty old buggar is Babe, and he effectively pulls Ned back from the brink of madness (but not quite all the way--that's where the "Revenge" part comes in). From Babe and the limited hospital library Ned receives a more intensive education than he was ever likely to get at Oxford--ask yourself how you'd spend all those years--becoming a master chess player and attaining fluency in over a half-dozen languages along the way while he prepares for life after his harrowing escape.

Fry's is an intellect which far surpasses that of most of his critics and, we must admit, many of his admirers as well. This book is an attempt at something much darker and less outrageous than his previous work. In so doing he mutes his narrative persona far more than in any of his previous work, which was at first slightly disappointing to me as a loyal fan. He succeeds, however in creating a genuine page-turner, even if it's not quite the thriller with a capital "t" one might have thought was coming. Still, this is a worthwile book and evidence that Fry has lost nothing of his customary depth and cleverness.

If you are new to Fry I wholeheartedly recommend "The Liar" and "The Hippopotamus" which may have you laughing out loud for days if you like your English humor both erudite and locker-room. There is still no living writer I'd rather invite to a dinner party more than Stephen Fry. Cheers!

I have no idea what the previous reviewers were thinking, but it certainly had nothing to do with the book, Revenge--or as it was entitled in the original, Stars' Tennis Balls.

Fry has never hidden the fact that this is the Count Monte Cristo story, and neither was he going to amend Dumas' storyline by much. It was simply reworked in a, well, very Stephen Fry-esque way. In order to understand it, you need to have known Stephen Fry and his work (including that in acting) for some time. He truly is a representative of a near-extinct type, the well-rounded man.

Revenge/Stars' Tennis Balls has a wealth of autobiographical elements by this rather troubled man, but he never loses his sense of humour about it, nor does it become annoying. It is a virtuoso's play with language that also serves as an entertaining read.

I finished this book in one night and recommend Fry's other works (Hippopotamus, Moab Is My Washpot, Making History, Liar, Paperweight), including his wonderful acting in the famous BBC series, Blackadder. To appreciate them, though, you need to be a bit of a Britophile.

The first fifty-or-so pages of this novel are witty, and comic, as those familiar with Frye's previous work will expect. Then, the hero Ned Maddstone is betrayed (a la the Count of Monte Cristo), spends 20 years unjustly locked in a mental institution, and returns to seek his revenge. I've noticed that previous reviewers who liked the Flippant Frye were disturbed by the Spooky, Scary Frye who replaces him in mid-book.

Let me give you another perspective: I think this was a change for the better. The young, flippant, self-centered, class-bound comic characters of the introduction made my poor Midwestern soul want to slap them silly. I can only take so much petulance. Over the course of the book, through the darker events, the charcters manage to grow and change. They are no longer twits. In their place, there is sharp writing, deft plotting (it may be Dumas' plotting, but it is still deft), and much excitement.

In short, this book managed to surprise me even though I knew the plot outline in advance--and how often can you say that anymore?

A final caveat - the violence is quite graphic, even sadistic (although believable in its way). Stay away if you don't like that sort of thing, and pray that Mr. Frye has a really good therapist.

Readers familiar with the plot of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, about the unjust political imprisonment of sailor Edmond Dantes in post-Napoleonic France, will not be surprised by the various turns taken in author Stephen Fry's modern version of the tale. When the book begins, Ned Maddstone, the seventeen-year-old son of a Tory MP, is bound for Oxford and, almost certainly, for a life marked by as much success as he has already enjoyed: a cricket-playing future Head Boy and member of a sailing club, Ned is polite and good looking and newly in love, and he has the easy grace that comes with aristocracy. He would never dream of offending, but in his unselfconscious perfection Ned manages to do just that, and he consequently falls victim to a plot hatched by three jealous acquaintances.

Though Fry's plot will not surprise, his reworking of the Dumas classic is cleverly done. Loyal Bonapartists have become IRA sympathizers, and treasures are now hoarded in Swiss bank accounts. Most charmingly, in the latter part of the book Ned is released into a gadgetized world that has been altered beyond measure by the computer revolution, reminding us of just how much our own lives have changed since 1980.

Fry's book is a good read, though the animosity Ned unwittingly provokes in his acquaintances seems unrealistically ferocious. (I do not know whether this might be said also of the original.) Readers who do not know what to expect of the book are likely in particular to enjoy it.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Ned Maddstone is 17 and has everything: a loving girlfriend, a father who is cabinet minister, good looks and the opportunity to study at Oxford. But then things start to go terribly wrong: while he is sailing the captain of the ship dies and gives him a letter to forward and while he is making love to his girlfriend, his friends decide to set him up with some dope. Both events are innocent, but together they make Ned fall into the clutches of the secret service. When he becomes a free man at last, more than 10 years have gone by. And after that it is all about revenge, and quite gruesome revenge at that.

The book is advertised as a modern day Count of Monte Christo. There are some beautiful descriptions in the book, especially the part describing the friendship between Ned and Babe, one of the other inmates, who gives Ned back his sanity and gives him the financial means for revenge. However, I have read more interesting, thought-provoking books by Stephen Fry. An entertaining read but not much more than that and way too much revenge for my taste...

"Revenge" is a first-rate, straight-up re-tell of "The Count of Monte Cristo." Golden boy gets ruined by jealous other boys, boy is spirited away to hell, boy's soul is saved by mentor, boy escapes from hell, boy exacts revenge upon all, reader has a helluva good time.

The reader won't be insulted by pretensions to political correctness or by excessive emphasis on modern media values like "caring" or by endless character development in this story -- and I do mean story. There's something about the book that seems to be saying, "I'm a story, an old-fashioned story, well-told and full of style but always a story, and ain't it grand?"

"Revenge" is relentlessly plot-driven and unapologetically formulaic. The hero does not search his soul, nor question his resolve, nor suffer any psychological torture that is not imposed from outside by someone else. The author does not engage in pathetic attempts to breathe Dostoevsky-ish complexity into the hero by having him question his motivation, then decide there's no real point to revenge, then decide he's better than all that, then let the bastards run free. No, this book is uncompromisingly loyal to the spirit of Dumas, and to the primitive human instinct for jealously, hatred, and revenge.

This is not to say that the story is simply lifted from Dumas and dumped on modern readers with a simple transfer of horses to cars or letters to emails. Fry is no slacker as a writer. He's simply shown the confidence to apply his considerable skill and originality to an old formula, so that we, the readers, have the pleasure of being led through a familiar plot line by an imaginative leader who knows how to take us where we want to go and how to give us the most fun as we get there. Fry's got the rhythm, he's got the style, he's got that English thing -- wit -- and we get to taste of it all. (Surely we can all agree that wit is an inexorably English thing. Americans can occasionally appreciate wit but do not have wit, as wit is too subtle to be generated by an American. Lest readers be insulted, I identify myself as an American. I am often funny, but never witty.)

It is said in some reviews that some readers may find the end a little gory. Those who long for punishment to meet crime will not object to the gore, and those who do object deserve whatever shock they suffer for having been so foolish as to buy a book with so straightforward a title as "Revenge."

A more serious disappointment is the slap-dash nature of the final pages, which wrap the book up with a capital C for Closure and all the finesse of the ending of Huck Finn. But, like Huck Finn, "Revenge" is almost destined to disappoint in its final pages. After all, the wild ride is over, the final moves on the board are revealed. Nothing can get better than the story that's gone before. It's best to exact the revenge with a series of quick strikes, then get these energetic people off the page and into a pleasant memory. Personally, I thank Fry for resisting the temptation to keep the characters flapping around in the dull aftermath of suspense.

I cannot recommend "Revenge" to those who disdain a strong plot line, who find anything but complex character development beneath them, who suffer pangs of guilt for enjoying a story in which the quality of mercy is rejected. But for those of us who love to spend dark nights riding wild over the pages through a thriller that takes us to the darkest places in our hearts without insisting we look too close, I suggest a copy of "Revenge."

(Spoilers alert!)

Fry, who after his nervous breakdown seems to have finally come to grips with his various issues, surprises many with a nasty, brutish little book based on the Count of Monte Cristo. One of these days some undergrad with too much time on his hands is going to write a very detailed and annotated analysis of Fry's work, and I am going to look forward to it. Naturally, if Stephen Fry ever gave me the opportunity to discuss this book with him personally, I'd jump at it.

Listen, the story's well known and it wouldn't ruin the book to tell it. Protagonist is a silly upper class twit - who, after a series of coincidences is put in the frame by jealous classmates for a minor crime, unfortunately, while also in possession (innocently) of an IRA communication. Coincidentally, the message was destined for the mother of the agent assigned to question him, and the next thing you know our hero is in a "psychiatric" "prison", buried away for life. Hero meets mentor in the hospital who melds him into the agent of retribution and gives him the means to make his escape and finance his revenge (an oversimplification, but I don't want to spoil it). Hero returns to home country and begins to robotically dispatch people, sometimes with gruesome methods (and a few improbable and in some cases impossible deus ex machina plot details)

What makes this such a dark and nihilistic book is that although A and B leads to C, the authors of A are punished for C, whereas they're only really guilty of A. The protagonist also suffers greatly, having done something very very very minor. The new title to this book does it a disservice - Fry's original title makes more sense, "The Stars' Tennis Balls", an allusion to the cosmic equivalent of that moment in the Aykroyd/Murphy vehicle "Trading Spaces" where the two old men ruin a man's life over a bet, which turns out to be for a dollar. Fry raises questions; big questions and dark questions, and it gets you thinking. Therefore, if you're waiting for this to come out on film so you can just watch the story, you're going to miss the point of the book completely. One thing that's a nice touch is that EVERYONE in the book is in some way an agent of his or her own destruction.

You're reading this for Fry's skill as an author and his wit, and his excellent ability to lull you at the beginning into a sense of false security before dropping the hammer, and then again, driving the sadism at the end home to a level unexpected for a man whose other books were lighthearted comedies.

There is one other thing to read this book for - and here's the hint Fry winks out at you. In the midst of the book, the mentor engages the protagonist in a Socratic dialogue under a tree. The entire book happens to also be a Socratic dialogue with the reader. I've drawn my own conclusions from what I read - but I can't wait to read what others can read and/or what Fry intended.

Read this book, and do so before some professor or teacher overanalyzes the [it] and assigns it as required reading for some course. They'll eventually stake it to the dissection table the same way the educational system ruins the magic of every other imaginative, intelligent, clever, subversive, or deviant little book. Beat them to the punch and enjoy the show.

Fry is best known for his comic writing and acting, but there's nothing whatever funny about the plight of seventeen-year-old Ned Maddstone, privileged (but far from wealthy) member of the British upper classes. He's bright (though naive), well-liked (by most), well-educated and headed for Oxford, and his father is a government minister -- and he's in love with a gorgeous young woman, so the world would seem to be his oyster. But two peers he thought were his friends, and who envy him the ease with which good things come, conspire with the girl's American cousin, who wants her for himself. Next thing he knows, Ned has been set up and busted by the cops for drug possession. But he's also innocently carrying an IRA communication that brings him to the notice of a thoroughly loathsome member of Britain's secret service, and Ned is soon plunged into a hell that causes him to disappear from the world and which destroys his life. This first part of the book is gripping and wince-producing as the reader witnesses Ned's destruction. The middle part, based closely on _The Count of Monte Cristo,_ is a little harder to accept -- but, hey, maybe being locked up for twenty years in an asylum with nothing else to do could cause this sort of flowering, given the right sort of fertilizer. In the latter part of the book, we follow Ned's quest for vengeance -- which he makes sure is his, not the Lord's. He really has gone insane, just as his original tormentor intended. And this completes his eventual destruction, in ways he could not have foreseen. As ever, Fry is a master of language and mood, and he doesn't try to convince you that Ned is "right," only that his mania can be understood.

Note: This book was published about a year ago with the title "The Stars Tennis Balls". Not sure what's up with the new title.

This is a very enjoyable read, and is the sort of book which is extremely hard to put down, almost from the first page. My only complaint is that the story was somehow forced. So many implausible things happen in this book (and the story is contingent on them all happening) that by the end I felt like they had detracted from the overall story. I don't want to spoil the story by giving specifics here, but be forewarned that there are some really unlikely coincidences in here.

With 'Revenge', Steven Fry continues to cement his reputation as one of Britain's leading modern novelists. Previous novels like 'The Liar' and 'The Hippopotamus' were brilliant, profane, and very, very funny.

Essentially a modern-day retelling of 'The Count of Monte Cristo', Fry has replaced the dashing sailor Edmond Dantes with naive English schoolboy and MP's son Ned Maddstone. Framed by a jealous associate in a fictitious drug transaction, an improbable series of coincidences involving IRA terrorists leads to Ned's imprisonment in a secret government insane asylum. There he is adopted by a polymath who teaches him languages, logic, history, and a variety of other useful knowledge. Further coincidence and years of imprisonment leads to Ned's realization of how he was framed, and by whom. Aided by his mentor, who has secreted a fortune in Swiss bank accounts, Ned escapes his prison and uses this wealth to recreate himself as a British Bill Gates. He then sets in motion a dark plan of revenge against all those who have wronged him.

Although the plot is improbable to the point of impossibility (as it was with Dumas' 'Count of Monte Cristo'), the black humor prevents the novel from descending to the silly or trite. This is not a feel-good novel. Bad things happen to good people, and the novel's resolution involves bad things happening to bad people--lots of very bad things as it turns out. Some might find the extreme eye-for-an-eye mentality to be too much revenge, but one must remember that this novel is essentially farce; albeit the dark side of farce.