Revenge !

The popular saying goes ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ - Is it really true?

Do you like me, feel disturbed reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ - the brilliant novel by Alexander Dumas? If Dantès, wasting away his life in solitary confinement in a faraway prison wrenched your hearts, his subsequent retribution did send chills down your spines! Somehow, everytime I read the novel (couple of times in different versions), I always felt restless afterwards. Revenge, I suppose, is never sweet. It does not leave anyone satisfied. Even if the crime is huge and life-shattering, somehow revenge does not seem to bring the desired solace.

If you think about it, most movies and novels and TV soaps have revenge as the main subject. Turn to any channel, and you will find some heavily made-up middle-aged woman, announcing to anyone that cares to hear, that she will not rest till she destroys her enemy’s family. Since this is always a winning subject and the makers cannot afford the audience to have any symapthies towards the antagonist, they try to paint them as dark as possible to show why the revenge is justified.

Not so in true life, isn’t it? People are just people ! Not heroes or villains. Nobody is completely white or black. All of us are grey characters. What seems right to us, may not seem so to others. Who are we to avenge ourselves for what we consider ‘injustice’? I am not talking about clear-cut wrong-doings like murder etc, just day-to-day things that happen to us.

I still get extremely angry when I think about the sports teacher in school, who had treated me terribly (I had written about him in one of my previous posts). Every time I think if there is someone in the world, I really hate, I cannot think of anyone else, so deep-rooted seems to be my hatred, probably because the bad experiences happened at an impressionable age. I am not able to make peace with these memories and I still imagine situations where he will be at my mercy and I deny him the same !!

But come to think of it, for all I know, if I see this guy today, revenge will probably be the last thought in my mind. He must definitely be old and will probably seem so pathetic that the only that would seem more pathetic would be my grudge against such a loser. It is also possible that all the hatred in me, needs some channel, and I am using this guy for it !!

The whole idea of this post was to actually talk about a novel that I read recently, but as always, my musings about the book took up as much or more space than the review of the book itself. The name of the book is ‘Revenge’ and the author is Stephen Fry - a comic genius from the land of comic geniuses - Britain! However the book is anything but funny !!

There is a reason why I mentioned the ‘Count of Monte Cristo’ in the beginning, apart from the fact that it was also about revenge and retribution, and the fact that I love to write ! As Stephen Fry himself confessed, after a couple of days of writing of the book, he realized that his story was the same as the original classic. Call, ‘Revenge’ the modern day re-telling of Dumas’s classic.

Set in England in 1980, ‘Revenge’ is about Ned Maddstone, the popular boy in school. He is 17, happy in life to have everything, to be loved by all- well almost all; in love with a beautiful girl and studying to go to Oxford. There are others - Portia, his beautiful lover, Gordon - Portia’s cousin, Ashley - a boy from a poor background, a wannabe blueblood who detests Ned for being everything that he (Ashley) is not and Rufus, a spineless junkie, who again hates Ned for no reason.

If you have read Count of Monte Cristo, you will see parallels every where. Like I said this is a modern day retelling. So the setting is different, the context is different, but the story is essentially the same. Where you had exiled king Napoleon as the backdrop, here we have the IRA and its supporters causing Ned’s arrest. Instead of a prison in a remote island, here it is a lunatic asylum where some political prisoners are put away. The heart burn is the same, as Ned turns from a good-natured seventeen year old boy, with his eyes full of dreams, to a cold, calculating and vengeful business man.

When he returns to avenge himself, it is 1999 and sure there is a duel between him and Portia’s son, but it has an interesting and modern twist to it. The warfare is psychological and destruction is total as in the original. True to the original, Ned does not find peace after his plan is executed and feels more restless than before.

I had not expected a thriller from Fry, but he has done a good job of it. I would not call it great literature, but it definitely is an interesting piece of work. Definitely recommended.