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Stop me if you've heard this before. A young Gascon arrives in 17th century Paris with the intent of joining the King's Musketeers. Being hotheaded, he manages to get himself committed to three duels in one afternoon, but in the event ends up fighting alongside his erstwhile opponents against the Cardinal's guard, and becomes an honoured fourth to the famous three musketeers. Oh yes, and he's already lost his letter of introduction to the head of the musketeers to a dastardly villain outside of town, and one of the musketeers has a murky past that involves a wife, a brand and a hanging, and there is a plot afoot that involves a compromising piece of the Queen's jewellery and an English duke. As it happens, there is also a mysteriously dead young woman dressed as a musketeer, whose fate may be connected to political intrigue. This is a fairly frustrating book. D'Almeida swashes a pretty good buckle, the narrative nips along smartly and there is humour as well as excitement in the tale. I quite liked the device of having the chapters alternate viewpoints among the four principal characters, which allows us to accompany them to different places and to see the same events through different filters. The musketeers conform to Dumas's descriptions, but D'Almeida has added some appropriate and interesting depth, in some cases. However, I have to question the wisdom of essentially retelling much of the first half of the original work while squeezing in the additional mystery of the woman in musketeer's dress; it deadens much of the suspense. In particular, the author spends rather a lot of time and effort on slowly revealing the story of Athos's fateful marriage, a story known to every reader of the Dumas book. I found this quite puzzling. I was also amused to note that 21st century prudery is apparently even stronger than the 19th century variety. This version's queen is most certainly not having an affair with her English duke; she nobly refrains despite her aching heart, sigh. Apart from the quite serious structural problem, the book is also thickly littered with all kinds of errors, from typos, misspellings and anachronisms to very peculiar wording and absurd continuity errors: for example, a room that was on the second floor on pages 67 and 91 was on the first floor from page 97 onward. I can overlook an error or two in a modern book, although the decision to dispense with proof-readers annoys me, but in this case the journey ran from annoying right through infuriating and on into ludicrous. Noticing the errors threatened to become a more amusing occupation than following the story. This is the first of what is intended to be a series of stories. It is possible that subsequent tales will not be so closely tied to the Dumas work, which should give some scope for original storytelling. But I can only hope the author will engage the services of an editor – or at least a proof-reader – privately, if her publishers are too cheap to provide one.
Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, December 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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