BENGALURU: This a book about books. The Club Dumas’ by Arturo Pérez-Revert has a main protagonist that teeters between the right and the wrong. It has megalomaniacal, omnipresent villains, femme-fatales with ambiguous motives; and not one, but two literary treasure-hunts for plotlines. It has the Devil, or at least explores methods to summon him. Yes, you can leave this column right here and go get the novel instead.
For the ones who are still here, the lead character, Lucas Corso, is a middle-aged, itinerant book-hunter with hardly any scruples. He is a prominent figure in the shadowy world of antique books - and is often hired by immensely rich collectors to procure for them that one copy of a nearly-impossible-to-find book. Maybe from a private collection? From a museum? Corso is the guy they seek out to get them, by fair means or foul.
This time, there are two simultaneous chases for Corso. The novel starts with the suicide, in Madrid, of a man later identified as Enrique Taillefer, who owned a supposedly original partial manuscript of The Three Musketeers’ by Alexandre Dumas, which contains a previously unknown chapter, ‘The Anjou Wine’. This falls in the hands of Corso, and he starts his quest to identify the authenticity of this manuscript.
He encounters Liana Taillefer, the beautiful widow of Enrique, who starts off by proclaiming ‘The Anjou Wine’ to be a fake, but then offers to buy the manuscript from Corso. Corso refuses, and later when she seduces him in order to get the book, Corso refuses to part with the book nevertheless, incurring her wrath. Mirroring the story of ‘The Three Musketeers’, Liana Taillefer becomes the equivalent of Milady de Winter, the arch-enemy of D’Artagnan. Simultaneously, a sinister figure, whom Corso nicknames Rochefort after the character in the book, makes his appearance, and tries to force the manuscript off Corso.
Corso had accepted another mission in the meantime. In Venice in the mid 1600s, the printer Aristide Torchia was burnt at the stake during the Inquisition for publishing the ‘Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadow’, one on the first few books ever printed, and known to contain a procedure to invoke the Devil. There is only one copy, and Varo Borja, an incredibly rich aristocrat, is said to own it.
But there are two other manuscripts which claim to be the original copy, and they are in a library in Paris and in a private collection in Lisbon. Borja summons Corso to his mansion in Toledo, and asks him to get the two other copies to Borja, for him to compare and contrast the woodcut drawings. Thus starts the second chase.
Some have called this book a love-letter to the printed word, and that is a fair description. There are paragraphs wdescribing the craft of antique book trade, of typesetting, of book-binding and antique book-selling. This is a fast-moving, masterfully-plotted, really well-written book, which I personally recommend.