Revenge

As an actor, Stephen Fry specializes in a certain brand of British absurdity: From his career-making roles in Blackadder and Jeeves And Wooster to his hilarious recent turn as the effusively incompetent inspector in Gosford Park, he's made himself memorable with a winning combination of charisma, high energy, and affected dimness. His comic novels, including The Liar and The Hippopotamus, showcase a similarly silly vigor. But his first "serious" novel, Revenge, shoots beyond absurdity and into the realm of the ridiculous. Fry's modern-day version of Alexandre Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo places the tellingly named Ned Maddstone in the place of Cristo's put-upon hero, Edmond Dantès. Charming, athletic, popular, passionately in love, the son of a prominent Member Of Parliament, and on his way to Oxford, Ned has it all, which infuriates Ashley Garland, a self-hating classmate with social pretensions. So Ashley conspires to frame Ned as a drug dealer, not dreaming that a string of coincidences circling around a dead boat captain's misdirected letter will end with Ned locked in an isolated island asylum for more than a decade. Naturally, Ned's first acquaintance on the island is a mad, sympathetic genius who teaches him chess, philosophy, logical thinking, the classics, and six different languages. So when Ned escapes, using the classic Cristo ruse, and carrying a fortune in drugs and the key to a huge bank account, he's in a perfect position to recast himself as a sophisticated dot-com bazillionaire—the modern version of Dumas' mysterious count—and seek his messy revenge on the men who set him up. Fry lays out roughly the first half of the book with realism and solid, humanistic humor. His characters are well-formed, funny, and intriguing, even though Ned wears his naïveté like a suit of armor and Ashley wears his ambition like a waxed black mustache, ripe for twiddling during villainous moments. But once Ned hits the asylum, he and everyone around him suddenly become the kind of over-the-top stereotypes common to Sidney Sheldon novels and Michael Bay movies. Ned's transformation from a decade-drugged prisoner who can't comprehend cell phones to the media-dubbed "Robespierre of the Digital Revolution... and the Jesus of Cool" happens offscreen and over the course of years, but still isn't plausible, and his status as an all-seeing, all-controlling mogul/hacker-god, capable of bribing anyone into anything, makes his successes both tediously inevitable and needlessly grotesque. Coincidence, contrivance, and hyperbole play such a large part in Revenge that it's tempting to assume Fry is deliberately mocking the conventions of his source material and his genre, but he himself dodges those conventions only by muddying the waters with some relatively minor ethical concerns, which he then proceeds to trample. Ultimately, he suggests, revenge is a dish best enjoyed hot, from an empyrean height, in a Grand Guignol manner, and at the expense of any believability.

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