8

  Edgar Allan Poe’s

  THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET(1838)

  Katherine Neville

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is both the inventor of the detective story and a towering force who raised horror fiction to literary heights. Born in Boston to a pair of theatrical troupers who died by the time he was two, Poe was adopted by the Allans of Virginia—possibly the origin of the “Allan” in the author’s name. John Allan was a merchant and took his young ward to England, where Poe was schooled for several years. After their return to Virginia, Poe’s life wavered from tragic to maudlin. He had a drinking and gambling problem, and was tossed out of the University of Virginia and West Point, where Mr. Allan had paid the bills. Enraged, Allan stopped supporting his adoptive son. The chaos continued: Poe’s succession of jobs, his marriage to his teenage cousin, her death of consumption, his despair, his death at the age of forty, possibly due to alcohol. Throughout, he revolutionized American literature and become a force that the Encyclopedia Britannica described, one century after his birth, as “a world author more purely than any other American writer.”

  My earliest encounters with Edgar Allan Poe were scarcely auspicious. Through years of grammar school, we beleaguered children were force-fed Poe’s dark poems and stories almost as a daily diet, until we could regurgitate any of them from our memories at the push of a button. Poe seemed to provide the only tool that teachers found, ready-to-hand, to demonstrate concepts like alliteration and assonance. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the “silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain,” and my head still clangs with the “tintinnabulation” of the “bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.” Even today, there’s scarcely a Poe plot device I can’t call upon to furnish some slow, gruesome torture—like bricking someone up into a wall. Indeed, there were times during those endless exams, when I fancied bricking Poe himself up into a wall! So it came as a real surprise when I was twelve or thirteen that the young adventurer Arthur Gordon Pym (himself age sixteen)—hero of Poe’s only novel—accidentally sailed into my life and swept me off on a voyage of discovery as no other fictional character had before.

  Poe was definitely a man ahead of his time. Today, his writing seems so fresh that it’s difficult to imagine just how far ahead of his time he must have seemed during his own life. To place this within historical context: On January 19, 1809 (when Poe was “born in a trunk” in Boston), Thomas Jefferson was still the sitting president of the fledgling United States, Napoleon was trying to conquer Spain, and fewer than twenty years had elapsed since the dawn of the French Revolution. Then, just three days after Poe’s birth—on January 22, 1809—something occurred that would impact the world into which Poe was born in a fashion no one could have conceived. On that morning, an obscure young British noble attained his majority: George Gordon, Lord Byron, turned twenty-one and took his seat in the House of Lords. A few short months later, Byron would sail for the Continent, a voyage that—upon the publication of his first adventure/quest,Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage —would launch a revolution in epic poetry, would electrify Western literature, and would make Byron himself immortal overnight.

  Poe’s life is often compared to Byron’s—their debauchery and massive debts while they were at school, their love of swimming, of shooting, of “manly feats of daring.” Interestingly, Poe spent his formative grammar school years in England, just at the time when Byron’s reputation raged as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” At the age of fifteen—in the same spring during which Byron died in Greece—Poe swam Virginia’s turbulent James River, comparing this feat to Byron’s youthful conquest of the Hellespont. While at West Point, he studied Byron’s poetry and became such an admirer that his adoptive father blamed Byron for Poe’s excessive behavior. Numerous allusions to Byron appear in Poe’s work.

  According to Poe, a poem is the perfect vehicle for expressing “Beauty,” but as he tells us in his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, only the short story can convey “terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points.” He takes great pains to stress the inferiority of the “ordinary novel [which is] objectionable, from its length . . . As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality.” Any outside interruption by “worldly interests intervening”—even just setting the book down for a moment—would “be sufficient to destroy the true unity.” Poe contrasts this handicap of the novel with the chief advantage of the short story, which can be read in under an hour, during which period “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”

  Given this stance, it is not surprising that, amid Poe’s astonishingly prolific body of work—newspaper articles, literary critiques, essays, editorials, puzzles, poetry, mysteries, horror stories—he wrote only one novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. (Byron’s family name was Gordon.) This complex book—three stories in one really—describes the adventures of a young man who stows away in the hold of a ship, is kidnapped by mutineers and pirates, suffers starvation, encounters cannibalism, explores the little-known Antarctic, and finds a riddle that dates back to ancient Ethiopia, Arabia, and Egypt, providing the key to Western mystical traditions. It is a triumph of swashbuckling-yet-erudite Byronic self-indulgence.

  The story at first seems disjointed. It is bracketed by two “testimonials.” In the prologue, Pym confesses that he has told his tale to an editor, Mr. Poe, and some “gentlemen from Richmond, Virginia,” and that Poe has published some of the tale in the newspapers, under the guise of fiction. Pym is now going to set the record straight with his own true narrative of his adventures. Then, at the apparently dangling end, we suddenly learn that Pym is unable to continue his story: he was killed in an unfortunate “accident.” The last vision that Pym recorded in his narrative was of a huge figure, perhaps a divine spirit, rising from a mist of white ashes in the Antarctic Ocean.

  Given all these multiple plots, the large cast of characters, the testimonials by others, the diaries, and theatrical asides that we find sprinkled throughout the book, what happened to the rigorous control that Poe demanded over the reader’s attention—even his soul? And despite all such baroque qualities, why does this story still live and breathe, some two hundred years later, as surprisingly fresh as the day it was written?

  The secret may be revealed in a peephole glance at a fascinating exchange between Poe and Charles Dickens, where Poe states, “There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. . . . Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. . . . [It is only then] that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” The genius of Pym is that, not only does the author have foreknowledge of the end, we the readers possess it, too—though when it comes, it is still a complete surprise.

  We are informed that the editors discovered something just before going to press with Mr. Pym’s memoir. Now this surprise discovery is revealed: three caves in the shape of ancient letters, forming a secret code that chillingly points us toward something sinister involving darkness and light. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what it means. This mysterious ending—which is presented almost as an afterthought— is both shocking and thrilling, for we suddenly realize that this cryptic revelation is the very denouement toward which the narrative has been hurtling since before page one.

  This literary technique—revealing something critical to the audience that the characters, the “editors,” and perhaps even the author do not know—is one of the oldest and perhaps most powerful, dating back to Lord Byron’s own mentors, the ancient Greeks. It is irony, a device used with chilling effect in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. As fresh now as the first time I opened its pages, the novel never fails to excite— one of the American progenitors of the modern adventure thriller.

  Katherine Neville was born in the Midwest and attended school in Colorado. From the age of eighteen, she worked full time, often taking any job she could get, including computer analyst, commercial photographer, portrait painter, busboy, waiter, and model. These and her postgraduate studies in African literature provided details to enrich her novels. Her twenty years as an international computer executive and consultant in finance and energy took her to six countries on three continents and half of the states in the U.S. After her first novel,The Eight, was published in 1988, Neville was described as the female Umberto Eco, the female Alexandre Dumas, and the female Steven Spielberg. Her books, including A Calculated Risk, The Magic Circle, and The Fire (a sequel to The Eight), have been bestsellers in nearly forty languages. In a poll by the noted Spanish journal El Pais,The Eight was voted one of the top ten books of all time.

  9

  Alexandre Dumas’

  THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (1845)

  Francine Mathews

  Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) had a life as outrageous and remarkable as his fictional characters. Born to a Santo Domingo slave girl and a Napoleonic general who was the mulatto son of a marquis, Dumas was a child of fortune from the moment of his father’s death, when he was only four. A penniless and ill-educated orphan, Dumas joined the household of the future king of France, Louis-Philippe, where he read extensively and observed the habits of the aristocracy. Following the revolution that placed Louis-Philippe on the throne, Dumas embarked on a career as playwright, then turned in his late thirties to historical novels, producing two of his most famous—The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo —in 1844. In that decade alone, he penned twenty-three plays, forty-one novels, a plethora of travel literature, and tales for children. Possessed of huge appetites for travel, food, and women, Dumas wrote prolifically to pay his constant debts. He claimed to have invented the serial novel (although Charles Dickens might argue the point), and may be the first “franchise” author the marketplace rewarded.

  When one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.

  —Alexandre Dumas

  Let’s be frank from the get-go: The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 117 installments over the course of two years, from 1844 to 1845, is a really long book. The Penguin Classics edition, translated from the French by Robin Buss (1996) with a stormy image of a nineteenth-century beach on the cover, clocks in at 1,243 pages. Most people will heft the volume, observe that it’s about as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and decide to order one of several movie versions from Netflix.

  This would be a sad but perfectly comprehensible mistake.

  Viewers are forced to choose between a forgettable feature-length 2002 version, the chortle-out-loud pleasures of a Richard Chamberlain television miniseries dating from 1975, and a variety of artier fare that stretches all the way back to 1918. This is a book that, like its brother The Three Musketeers, has served as epic rip-off fodder for more than a century. That is, in itself, the ultimate argument for retrieving the tome from its current use as a doorstop and sitting down—preferably by a good fire with a better bottle of wine—for several nights of complete reading bliss.

  The Count, as we’ll call it for the sake of brevity, is like a caravan through the desert with Scheherazade riding shotgun. It’s a collection of tales each more fantastic than the last, with the overarching theme of implacable revenge providing a sense of unity. Like the revolutionary times it was meant to evoke, it’s a chaotic mix: infanticide, illegitimate heirs raised in orphanages, a countess who systematically poisons her stepfamily, a girl who runs away with her lesbian lover, smugglers, suicides, and aborted duels, fabulous caves filled with jewels, drug-induced erotic dreams, sex slaves, gruesome public executions, and of course, a wronged man whose innocence is rewarded.

  Kind of.

  Edmond Dantès, the antihero at the heart of the novel, is nineteen when three jealous rivals frame him as a Napoleonic sympathizer. He’s pulled without explanation, charge, or trial from his betrothal feast, and buried alive for fourteen years in the island dungeons of the Chateau d’If, off the coast of Marseille. While he’s presumed dead, his rivals make fortunes and win titles. One even marries his fiancée, Mercédès. Meanwhile his beloved father dies of starvation. Dantès, on the other hand, tunnels under his dungeon wall nightly to meet up with an aged priest, Abbé Faria, who spends a decade teaching the young sailor everything he knows—languages, philosophy, mathematics, science. Faria shares his last secret only on his deathbed, however: the key to an immense fortune buried for centuries on the island of Monte Cristo. If Dantès survives, Faria insists, he must claim the treasure and put it to good use. Dantès swears instead to seek his revenge.

  The next scene is one I have never forgotten, the one that remains with me through all the books I have ever read or will ever write, the one that registers The Count in the annals of great thriller fiction: the old priest dies. And Dantès takes a risk. Dantès takes his place.

  He carries the corpse to his own cell and lies down inside Faria’s shroud. He sews it shut from the inside. At midnight, his jailers tie a thirty-six pound cannon ball to his feet, and toss him off the Chateau d’If’s cliffs into the Mediterranean Sea.

  No matter how comfortable your chair or how safe your circumstances, no matter where you read this particular chapter (and remember, it was first read as a newspaper installment, ending with a literal cliff-hanger), Dumas’ writing will chill your blood and raise the hair on the back of your neck.

  The Dantès who cuts himself free of that watery grave and rises gasping to the surface is a Dantès transformed, a god resurrected: he is the Count of Monte Cristo, an omniscient superhero, from that moment forward.

  This all occurs in the first four hundred pages of the book, and in many ways they’re the most critical. They provide the reader with an anguished and completely compelling portrait of a good man perverted and destroyed by the randomness of his victimization. It’s a profoundly modern concept— Kafka used it a hundred years after Dumas, and the character of Jason Bourne embodies it in our own age. That sense of the modern—of a victim fighting a faceless conspiracy—predisposes us to sympathize and justify everything Dantès does in the years that follow. It’s a bloody progress: one enemy shoots himself in the head, another goes bankrupt, a third is driven insane. The collateral damage is immense. Through it all, the count is a model of aristocratic brio. He dresses beautifully. His horses, his houses, his tables are of the finest. He is feared and admired as another Lord Byron, or perhaps—as one woman believes—a vampire. His performance is a perfectly sustained example of heartless cool.

  In the end, that’s what brings us back to Alexandre Dumas: his accessibility. It doesn’t matter that The Count of Monte Cristo was written 165 years ago, about a dangerous political time that has long since faded from memory. Its storytelling is pitch perfect, its revenge plot intricate and swiftly paced. This is rollicking entertainment that keeps us on the edge of our seats. And on that twelve hundred and forty-third page, as Edmond Dantès sails off into the sunrise with his freed sex slave, Haydée, you just might find yourself wishing for a few more installments.

  Francine Mathews spent four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, which provided some of the material for her spy novels The Cutout, The Secret Agent, and Blown. Her The Alibi Club was named one of the fifteen best novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. As Stephanie Barron, Francine writes the critically acclaimed Jane Austen mystery series. As Barron, she is also the author of A Flaw in the Blood, set in Victorian England, and The White Garden, about Virginia Woolf.

  10

  Wilkie Collins’s

  THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1860)

  Douglas Preston

  Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) is widely credited with having invented the modern thriller with The Woman in White. The son of a well-known Royal Academy artist in London, Collins spent part of his teenage years in Italy, an experience that influenced him greatly; he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, and dabbled in painting before taking up writing. In 1851, Collins met Charles Dickens, thus launching a lifetime collaboration and friendship. The two wrote plays, short stories, and nonfiction works together, and Dickens serialized several of Collins’s novels in his weekly publication,All the Year Round. Their relationship, dramatized in Dan Simmons’s Drood, was so close that Collins was later nicknamed the “Dickensian Ampersand,” but at the height of his popularity, Collins was the more famous, more beloved, and better-selling writer. Suffering from rheumatic gout for much of his life, Collins grew addicted to laudanum, the notorious Victorian tincture of opium and alcohol. He suffered hallucinations and labored under the delusion that he was being shadowed by a doppelgänger he called “Ghost Wilkie.” After the 1868 publication of his celebrated novel,The Moonstone, his writing declined as his drug addiction, gout, and corpulence increased. Following Dickens’s death in 1870, Collins produced a series of increasingly wretched books until his own death in 1889, at age sixty-five. He left behind a literary legacy of more than two dozen novels, over a hundred nonfiction works, fifty short stories, and at least fifteen plays—and one of the greatest thrillers,The Woman in White.

  There are literary moments one never forgets. Keats memorialized one in his poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” when he compared the experience of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer to Cortez discovering the Pacific Ocean. One of my memorable literary moments occurred when I cracked a dog-eared paperback of The Woman in White I’d bought from a street vendor on Broadway in New York City for twenty-five cents. I was in my early twenties; it was lunchtime, and I sat on a bench next to Central Park Pond, opposite the Museum of Natural History, where I worked as a writer and editor.