Not For the Faint-Hearted

I finished reading "The Man in the Iron Mask" yesterday, this being the third volume in the third part of the Musketeers trilogy. Which was great, being full of intrigue and incident, and which proved to be a very fitting end to that saga. Except...

It turned out not to be a venture for the faint of heart. After nearly 2,000 pages of comings and goings, intrigues and schemes, swashbuckling and derring-do, suddenly there was a chapter entitled "The Last Farewell", where Aramis, Porthos, and Athos finally come together for the first time in the novel... and suddenly it's clear that this novel isn't going to have a happy ending.

And it gets grimmer and grimmer from there, as it becomes apparent that Aramis has over-reached himself, d'Argtanian has been outflanked on all sides, and Porthos... ah, Porthos...

What's perhaps most interesting about the novel is that it is so unlike "The Three Musketeers", and that it's all the better for that - the four are now old men, they're all enmeshed in their own agendas, and they've grown apart in loyalty and temperament. And yet, when d'Argtanian is really pushed to choose between his king and his friends...

So, any time you've got a spare few months, I recommend the trilogy. (You can't really read this one without reading "The Three Musketeers" and "Twenty Years After" first, and you really can't read "The Man in the Iron Mask" without having read "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" and "Louise de la Valliere" first! But since the shortest of these volumes is some 600 pages of fairly dense text, that might take a while.)

So, good fun, but rather harrowing!

#3: "The Man in the Iron Mask", by Alexandre Dumas