The Club Dumas

I'm unsure what led me to read The Club Dumas (El Club Dumas) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  I was most likely -- for some reason -- reading the Wikipedia article on the 1999 Roman Polanski film, The Ninth Gate, and discovered that it was based on a novel. I thought it odd that the film had a completely different name and that probably made me think the novel worth checking out.

I read The Club Dumas in Finnish. The Finnish title of the novel, Yhdeksäs portti, is a literal translation of the film's name, which wouldn't be unusual if not for the fact that the translated book is from 1998, a year before the movie came out. I don't know if that is coincidental or coordinated. The Ninth Gate title comes from a fictional book in the novel: De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis -- The Nine Doors [or Gates] to the Kingdom of Shadows -- whose last three remaining copies the protagonist, book dealer Lucas Corso (Dean Corso in the film), is investigating. The story is set around the time of the novel's publication year 1993.

The full title of the Finnish translation is actually longer than what is printed on the cover: Yhdeksäs portti, eli, Richelieun varjo -- "The Ninth Gate, or The Shadow of Richelieu". It foreshadows the double layer of the novel, although its reader is unlikely to get it fully until much later. The film's script dropped off half of the narrative, which made it lose a whole lot of the literary noteworthiness and intrigue the book has. Then again, the full narrative probably wouldn't have made any better of an adaptation. I don't recall the film Corso constantly reminiscing his ex-wife either. But that kind of inner monologue doesn't translate well to the screen.

As it is, the film is a pretty straightforward neo-noir thriller. But I've liked its cinematography ever since I first watched it the first time: the way a shot is often aimed to look at the horizon through an opening or tunnel of some sort. I also like the single supernatural scene the film has -- faithfully to its source, as it turned out. In the scene, Corso has been pushed down stairs to the shore of the Seine and he can be considered an unreliable narrator in the novel due to being barely conscious from all the rolling. In the film, seen from the camera's perspective, it's more veritable that Corso's companion described to fly down the stairs after him and his assailant, actually does fly down them. It's quite eerie how she does it as silent as an owl.

In the film, Corso (Johnny Depp) has dubbed his guardian angel Green Eyes (Emmanuelle Seigner), while in the novel she -- eventually -- says her name to be Irene Adler like the character in the Sherlock Holmes stories she's been reading. She supposedly lives at Mr. Holmes's fictional address on the Baker Street as well. Irene is quite the mysterious character, by her own account a fallen angel, maybe even Luficer, though that was maybe just my interpretation.

In the novel, in addition to having been hired to solve The Ninth Gate mystery, Corso has also been tasked by a different bookseller to verify the authenticity of a manuscript by the titular Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, among many other works. The novel goes quite deep into Dumas's works, life, and personality. I was surprised by how interesting I found it all. The film also hadn't spoiled the whole thing.

The novel's prose, at least in the translation, is quite captivating. You do want to find out, with Corso, what kind of devil worshiper Dumas is going to turn out to have been. The book also features the gate illustrations found in the copies of The Ninth Gate as Corso gets to peruse them each, so you can yourself compare them to each other to see if there are differences.

The endings of the novel and the film adaptation are quite similar but I don't recall the film dropping one final mystery like Corso does in the novel -- one more for the road for the reader to ponder. The novel's narration is also worth mentioning because, while the story is largely told in limited third person following Corso, the narrator is another character in the story, literary critic Boris Balkan, who recounts the happenings as told to him by Corso later. Boris only few times shifts to direct first person to address the reader.

I wasn't really expecting anything so I don't think I can say that The Club Dumas was a positive surprise. But it was definitely a good read.

A Latin phrase to remember from the book: vulnerant omnes, ultima necat -- all [hours] wound, the last one kills. It's a memento mori type of proverb apparently engraved on clocks in the past.