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Overview
This brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of Monte Cristo centers on Ned Maddstone, a happy, charismatic, Oxford-bound seventeen-year-old whose rosy future is virtually pre-ordained. Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned leads a charmed life. But privilege makes him an easy target for envy, and in the course of one day Ned’s destiny is forever altered. A promise made to a dying teacher combined with a prank devised by a jealous classmate mutates bewilderingly into a case of mistaken arrest and incarceration. Ned finds himself a political prisoner in a nightmarish exile that lasts years, until a fellow inmate reawakens Ned’s intellect and resurrects his will to live. The chilling consequences of Ned’s recovery are felt worldwide.
Synopsis
A distinct departure from his popular comic novels, this haunting, provocative tale of wrongful imprisonment and violent retribution is Stephen Fry's first thriller.
Book Magazine
Most of actor/author Fry's modernized update of The Count of Monte Cristo is engrossing and witty, a good read in its own right with an added kick for anyone who read the original by Alexandre Dumas or saw the latest movie adaptation. Ned is a perfect, if naive, British schoolboy who gets set up on a false drug arrest engineered by jealous schoolmates Ashley and Rufus and love rival Gordon. When Oliver, an intelligence agent, discovers that Ned holds evidence that would incriminate Oliver's mother, an IRA operative, he hides Ned away. After ten years in an isolated room of a psychiatric hospital, Ned gets assistance from a fellow patient named Babe, escapes and retrieves his treasure (a Swiss bank account, naturally). The story couldn't be more fun—until vengeance time. Ned's subsequent ploys lead to the unlikely murders and suicides of characters whose complexities are squandered for the sake of a tidy ending.
Editorials
Steve Wilson
Most of actor/author Fry's modernized update of The Count of Monte Cristo is engrossing and witty, a good read in its own right with an added kick for anyone who read the original by Alexandre Dumas or saw the latest movie adaptation. Ned is a perfect, if naive, British schoolboy who gets set up on a false drug arrest engineered by jealous schoolmates Ashley and Rufus and love rival Gordon. When Oliver, an intelligence agent, discovers that Ned holds evidence that would incriminate Oliver's mother, an IRA operative, he hides Ned away. After ten years in an isolated room of a psychiatric hospital, Ned gets assistance from a fellow patient named Babe, escapes and retrieves his treasure (a Swiss bank account, naturally). The story couldn't be more fun—until vengeance time. Ned's subsequent ploys lead to the unlikely murders and suicides of characters whose complexities are squandered for the sake of a tidy ending.Publishers Weekly
Fry is a well-known British comic actor (he was the detective in Gosford Park) who has written several comic novels that are sometimes extremely funny, sometimes simply outrageous and over the top. In this, his first attempt at a serious thriller, he begins well, but ends up going over the top again in a different way. His hero, Ned Maddstone, is a delightful young man, gifted but diffident in that special English way, and very much in love. By an extraordinary set of coincidences, a trap set for him by envious schoolmates and a rival in love combines with an explosive secret in the life of a powerful British security official to send Ned off to perdition in a sinister sanatorium on a Baltic island where, forgotten to the world, he is exiled for nearly 20 years while his personality disintegrates. A meeting with another lost soul rebuilds his brain and will to live and inspires an escape; whereupon a very different Ned is loosed upon the world, a man of mystery and infinite wealth whose only aim is to fetch death and disaster on those who brought him down as a youth. Fry achieves some gripping scenes, and Ned, until his ultimate turnaround, remains endearing and believable. After that the novel becomes a highly schematic bloodbath, and some rather glib philosophizing about privacy and the Internet cannot make the final scenes seem other than heavily portentous. Fry is a writer of real talent and ideas, but needs a stern editor to save him from his excesses which on the screen would be called overacting. (July 23). Forecast: Those who enjoyed Fry's lighter previous work will be hardly expecting something so dark and violent, and it may prove difficult to orchestrate a new readership. Pairing it with the movie tie-in to The Count of Monte Cristo may help the book find its proper audience. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
This novel is guaranteed to open new vistas in the mind on notions of fate, destiny and the "hand of God." The plot, patterned on the Count of Monte Cristo, begins with a group of 17-year-olds in England, and a childish prank that sets the stage for rest of the novel. Ned, son of a prominent politician, lives a charmed life and is madly in love with Portia, who ardently returns his affection. Portia's cousin, Gordon, newly arrived from the U.S., is also in love with Portia. Rufus, with issues of his own, is a convenient ally in the plot hatched to effect "a bit of a comedown for the holy one and his father." They know nothing of the sealed list in Ned's pocket that inexorably links him to the IRA. Life goes on for the schoolmates for the next 20 years until Simon Cotter shows up on the global high tech scene. Rich, influential, eccentric and making inroads into the life of each character in the plot, he counts down until they have met their unraveling based on indiscretions in personal and business affairs. Recommended for a mature audience, this novel is a tangle of personal resentment and social climbing set against the backdrop of political intrigue. Adult subjects and the use of obscenity are plentiful but confined to the appropriate characters. The author is a London-based actor (Gosford Park, A Civil Action, Wilde); this is his fourth novel. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students and adults. 2000, Random House, 220p.,— Ann Hart