This was rough going. Though I have loved Dumas in the past (The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite novels of all time) I really struggled through the first 500+ pages of this 700 page book. The characters are caricatures, dashing and hot-tempered and filled with an utter disregard for human life -- including their own. They act with little to no motivation, running people through for slights and getting involved in court intrigue for no reason I can discover -- all of which would be fine and which I expected. What I did not expect was how idiotic they all are, petulant and whimsical and all in all no better equipped to exist in the world than a 3-year old.

The novel did finally pick up at the very end, when Dumas let Milady run away with it. All of a sudden it was sweeping and grand and romantic and tragic -- Milady is a character that very much deserves her own novel, and one in which the author (or the translator -- I was reading the Lord Sudley translation which I have heard is rather Victorian in its moral outlook) doesn't pause every scene with at least one diatribe about how she is evil incarnate and unwomanly (a sin he seems to find rather worse than the first). The final hundred pages I read breathlessly, the way I read all 1300 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. I just wish I didn't have to wade through all the incomprehensible fluff that got me there.

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After doing a little research online, I learned that the 1950 translation of THE THREE MUSKETEERS by Lord Sudley was considered a superior one. So thats the edition I plowed into. While the Sudley edition includes an interesting introduction, I only wish it also provided the sort of annotations included in the Oxford University Press edition edited by David Coward. Still, this lack of editorial notes didnt subtract from the enjoyable experience of reading the story of DArtagnan and his three friends, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

Like the 1973 film, this novel is a romp. The camaraderie of the four heroes, and their contrasting characteristicsthat sometimes put their intentions at odds until adversity rears its headlays the groundwork for a multitude of teams that follow: Doc Savages scrappy adventurers, the Shadows slew of agents, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, the X-Files, even Luke and Han and Chewie and a couple of robots, and so on. Dumas includes lots of action, with a dose of historical events (which arent necessarily accurate in their historic details), plus humor and court intrigue. And swordplay!

Outside the four musketeers, the characters Dumas describes are quite remarkable. The sly manipulations of Cardinal Richelieu, meant to maintain his power over the king and court, are balanced by the ways he decides to use DArtagnan and others, and the ways he decides to let them go their merry ways even when they may thwart his ambitions. For true evil, Dumas sculpted the template for every subsequent femme fatale by creating Milady, Lady de Winter. Her absolute evilness and unrelenting self-interest make her one of the most villainous villainesses ever to appear in literature.

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