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igenlodeI don't normally listen to audiobooks (they are too slow a method of ingesting literature). However, this pair of cassettes were in danger of being disposed of as obsolete, so I thought I'd give them a listen first.
Hugh Laurie, for those of us who know him only as a comedian, turns out to be an excellent reader, and even manages to make Sir Percy's infamous affected dandy-speech sound more plausible than it ever does written down on the page -- or maybe that's just the choice of dialogue for the adaptation! After listening to an audio "Tale of Two Cities" a few years ago that chose to omit the entire episode of Doctor Manette's backstory, so that we never learn why he was in the Bastille in the first place or the reason why Madame Defarge hates the family so much, or get the intervention at Darnay's trial (it's actually a clever choice of abridgement that means you can shorten the plot a lot while retaining much of Dickens' characteristic rambling prose, and doesn't alter the overall action all *that* much...) I do find myself wondering how much of the book was left out in order to fit in into two audio cassettes.
There is pretty obviously a missing scene, for example, in which Theresia Cabarrus discovers that the note which annoyed her so much was planted by Chauvelin rather than being a genuine message from the Scarlet Pimpernel, and one can't help wondering what happened to Régine (since such care is taken to rescue Bertrand's dead body, presumably it was with the intention of returning it to her, or at least being able to inform her that he had been decently interred?) Unfortunately I can't lay hands on my copy of the original novel, although I know that I have read it and can see no reason why that volume would have become detached from the other Orczys in my possession.
The bit that one really remembers from this story, of course, is that Sir Percy goes to the lengths of getting himself branded (without, presumably, the merciful bottle of brandy stipulated by Chauvelin for Rateau!) in order to be able to continue passing as the coal-heaver's double, which is a brilliant short-term expedient but which always struck me as terribly risky in the long term: he has now provided his enemies with an infallible means of identifying him in the future. What I hadn't realised, since I was reading the books out of order as and when I was able to get hold of the ancient second-hand copies, was that this is apparently the final "Scarlet Pimpernel" story.
Which makes sense, since it has been set so as to encompass the fall of Robespierre and the very end of the Terror; it was just that, given the generic title and Chauvelin's prominent position in the Committee of Public Safety, I'd always assumed that this was a fairly early sequel! (It does explain Sir Percy's complete lack of surprise that Theresia apparently knows that the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sir Percy Blakeney are one and the same person, a secret that both he and Chauvelin had previously been keeping very quiet for very different reasons.)
I am still rather surprised, because I retain a distinct memory of reading a very atypical Scarlet Pimpernel story in which the League ends up being called upon to rescue the daughter of the Marquis de Chauvelin (as, like Lafayette, the ardent revolutionary is eventually revealed to have been) in her country obscurity, an agonising situation for the unfortunate Chauvelin which one would have thought would have altered the relationship between him and his nemesis to a degree that would at least be acknowledged later. This one feels very much business as usual -- but it's undoubtedly possible that the books, while existing as I remember them, were written out of chronological order, so that these events effectively had not 'happened' yet.
I do remember being very surprised to discover when reading about the French Revolution, years later, that Tallien, who features as a minor protagonist in this novel, was actually a real person; I certainly had no idea whatsoever that the Cabarrus, who plays a major and presumably (given the invented character of Percy Blakeney) entirely fictional role in the action, also really existed! In Orczy's day, authors were presumably as blasé as Shakespeare about employing real people in name only to take part in their plots... and, to be fair, I have seen modern authors writing steampunk with Ada Lovelace as action heroine, or turning Oscar Wilde into an crime-solving amateur sleuth.
If Chauvelin seriously expected her to be able to *seduce* Sir Percy to his doom, however, as she appears to believe to be within her powers, then he makes a serious and uncharacteristic miscalculation. I would guess that his suggestion that the ultimate downfall of the Scarlet Pimpernel will be at the hands of a woman more probably relies upon his enemy's fatal tendency towards chivalry where the fair sex are concerned; at any rate, while Sir Percy does take the precaution of dropping a word of warning in his wife's ear where Theresia is concerned, he refrains from unmasking her as an agent of the Republican government, and thus indirectly puts Marguerite in peril. On the other hand, Sir Percy shows an unhesitating lack of qualms in framing Theresia, woman or no woman, as his accomplice, thus endangering her life at the hands of the Revolution in order to bring down Robespierre himself.
I felt that she comes across rather oddly in this adaptation, but it's hard to know whether this is because we are missing out on intervening moments of context or whether the author really hasn't given her any motivation for her inconsistent attitudes towards the other characters.
Marguerite has some excuse for getting kidnapped in this one, as she finds herself betrayed not by the imposter Theresia but by someone she has absolutely no reason not to trust. Régine in particular, on the other hand, gets very much the short end of the straw -- we keep expecting Bertrand to come to his senses and return to his first love...
For Chauvelin I have had an undoubtedly unintended sympathy for a long time; he is in a terribly perilous personal position, walking a tightrope above the teeth of a Revolutionary tiger that has no pity for failure, he is up against a foe who, by authorial decree, will always be able to slip free at the last moment from any trap he can devise, and he is a physically small and slightly-built man who is borne up by his undoubted intellect, and who flinches above all at the prospect not of danger but of ridicule and humiliation. But as traps go, this one seems a bit lacking: he has had Marguerite Blakeney kidnapped (again), and he threatens her husband that if Sir Percy doesn't simply hand himself over, then she will be shot. Why then give him four days' grace in which to come up with a rescue scheme (as he inevitably does?) Why not insist that his enemy, once successfully induced to make his appearance, surrender himself on the spot if he wishes to exchange his life for that of Marguerite -- or, even better, arrange to have him executed right away? Presumably Chauvelin is committing the cardinal Evil Overlord sin of delaying in order to gloat, but one feels that past experience really should have taught him better.
I definitely recognised large chunks of this audiobook, and Hugh Laurie reads it admirably. However, overall as with most adaptations I'm left with a subsequent desire to revisit the original; one always tends to prefer the version first encountered. (It did take me years as a child to reconcile myself to the original version of "The Count of Monte-Cristo" rather than to the simplified plot of the dramatisation we had on a single LP!)
Hugh Laurie, for those of us who know him only as a comedian, turns out to be an excellent reader, and even manages to make Sir Percy's infamous affected dandy-speech sound more plausible than it ever does written down on the page -- or maybe that's just the choice of dialogue for the adaptation! After listening to an audio "Tale of Two Cities" a few years ago that chose to omit the entire episode of Doctor Manette's backstory, so that we never learn why he was in the Bastille in the first place or the reason why Madame Defarge hates the family so much, or get the intervention at Darnay's trial (it's actually a clever choice of abridgement that means you can shorten the plot a lot while retaining much of Dickens' characteristic rambling prose, and doesn't alter the overall action all *that* much...) I do find myself wondering how much of the book was left out in order to fit in into two audio cassettes.
There is pretty obviously a missing scene, for example, in which Theresia Cabarrus discovers that the note which annoyed her so much was planted by Chauvelin rather than being a genuine message from the Scarlet Pimpernel, and one can't help wondering what happened to Régine (since such care is taken to rescue Bertrand's dead body, presumably it was with the intention of returning it to her, or at least being able to inform her that he had been decently interred?) Unfortunately I can't lay hands on my copy of the original novel, although I know that I have read it and can see no reason why that volume would have become detached from the other Orczys in my possession.
The bit that one really remembers from this story, of course, is that Sir Percy goes to the lengths of getting himself branded (without, presumably, the merciful bottle of brandy stipulated by Chauvelin for Rateau!) in order to be able to continue passing as the coal-heaver's double, which is a brilliant short-term expedient but which always struck me as terribly risky in the long term: he has now provided his enemies with an infallible means of identifying him in the future. What I hadn't realised, since I was reading the books out of order as and when I was able to get hold of the ancient second-hand copies, was that this is apparently the final "Scarlet Pimpernel" story.
Which makes sense, since it has been set so as to encompass the fall of Robespierre and the very end of the Terror; it was just that, given the generic title and Chauvelin's prominent position in the Committee of Public Safety, I'd always assumed that this was a fairly early sequel! (It does explain Sir Percy's complete lack of surprise that Theresia apparently knows that the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sir Percy Blakeney are one and the same person, a secret that both he and Chauvelin had previously been keeping very quiet for very different reasons.)
I am still rather surprised, because I retain a distinct memory of reading a very atypical Scarlet Pimpernel story in which the League ends up being called upon to rescue the daughter of the Marquis de Chauvelin (as, like Lafayette, the ardent revolutionary is eventually revealed to have been) in her country obscurity, an agonising situation for the unfortunate Chauvelin which one would have thought would have altered the relationship between him and his nemesis to a degree that would at least be acknowledged later. This one feels very much business as usual -- but it's undoubtedly possible that the books, while existing as I remember them, were written out of chronological order, so that these events effectively had not 'happened' yet.
I do remember being very surprised to discover when reading about the French Revolution, years later, that Tallien, who features as a minor protagonist in this novel, was actually a real person; I certainly had no idea whatsoever that the Cabarrus, who plays a major and presumably (given the invented character of Percy Blakeney) entirely fictional role in the action, also really existed! In Orczy's day, authors were presumably as blasé as Shakespeare about employing real people in name only to take part in their plots... and, to be fair, I have seen modern authors writing steampunk with Ada Lovelace as action heroine, or turning Oscar Wilde into an crime-solving amateur sleuth.
If Chauvelin seriously expected her to be able to *seduce* Sir Percy to his doom, however, as she appears to believe to be within her powers, then he makes a serious and uncharacteristic miscalculation. I would guess that his suggestion that the ultimate downfall of the Scarlet Pimpernel will be at the hands of a woman more probably relies upon his enemy's fatal tendency towards chivalry where the fair sex are concerned; at any rate, while Sir Percy does take the precaution of dropping a word of warning in his wife's ear where Theresia is concerned, he refrains from unmasking her as an agent of the Republican government, and thus indirectly puts Marguerite in peril. On the other hand, Sir Percy shows an unhesitating lack of qualms in framing Theresia, woman or no woman, as his accomplice, thus endangering her life at the hands of the Revolution in order to bring down Robespierre himself.
I felt that she comes across rather oddly in this adaptation, but it's hard to know whether this is because we are missing out on intervening moments of context or whether the author really hasn't given her any motivation for her inconsistent attitudes towards the other characters.
Marguerite has some excuse for getting kidnapped in this one, as she finds herself betrayed not by the imposter Theresia but by someone she has absolutely no reason not to trust. Régine in particular, on the other hand, gets very much the short end of the straw -- we keep expecting Bertrand to come to his senses and return to his first love...
For Chauvelin I have had an undoubtedly unintended sympathy for a long time; he is in a terribly perilous personal position, walking a tightrope above the teeth of a Revolutionary tiger that has no pity for failure, he is up against a foe who, by authorial decree, will always be able to slip free at the last moment from any trap he can devise, and he is a physically small and slightly-built man who is borne up by his undoubted intellect, and who flinches above all at the prospect not of danger but of ridicule and humiliation. But as traps go, this one seems a bit lacking: he has had Marguerite Blakeney kidnapped (again), and he threatens her husband that if Sir Percy doesn't simply hand himself over, then she will be shot. Why then give him four days' grace in which to come up with a rescue scheme (as he inevitably does?) Why not insist that his enemy, once successfully induced to make his appearance, surrender himself on the spot if he wishes to exchange his life for that of Marguerite -- or, even better, arrange to have him executed right away? Presumably Chauvelin is committing the cardinal Evil Overlord sin of delaying in order to gloat, but one feels that past experience really should have taught him better.
I definitely recognised large chunks of this audiobook, and Hugh Laurie reads it admirably. However, overall as with most adaptations I'm left with a subsequent desire to revisit the original; one always tends to prefer the version first encountered. (It did take me years as a child to reconcile myself to the original version of "The Count of Monte-Cristo" rather than to the simplified plot of the dramatisation we had on a single LP!)
no subject
Date: 2024-10-19 02:32 am (UTC)That one is "Sir Percy Hits Back", which according to the list I found was published a few years after "The Triumph".
no subject
Date: 2024-10-20 01:22 pm (UTC)Makes sense: the timeframe for this story is pretty much prescribed by involving the fall of Robespierre as a plot point, which means that if the author wanted to write any further Scarlet Pimpernel novels she would then have been obliged to go back and set them at an earlier date, before the end of the Terror. On locating a list of the novels in 'chronological order' of setting, I found "Sir Percy Hits Back" (which I always want to write as "Strikes Back"!) listed as occurring as the penultimate story, immediately before this one, and as I (vaguely) remember it, it wouldn't fit very well any earlier in the series. It doesn't exactly fit well in the context of "Triumph", but presumably the author was rather stuck with that!
Possibly I ought to go back and reread it; I definitely do have a copy of "Sir Percy Hits Back" on the shelves, alongside "Eldorado" and "Lord Tony's Wife" (and "The Laughing Cavalier", which I remember as being a pretty much unreadable 17th-century spin-off), but am currently in the middle of "The Elusive Pimpernel", which I picked up under the initial illusion that it was the book version of the audio I'd just been listening to (these confounded series titles, all the same!)
I do remember "Sir Percy Hits Back" as being one of the more unusual ones, consisting almost entirely of non-regular characters in a new setting...
Chauvelin
Date: 2024-10-20 02:20 pm (UTC)Glancing back at "The Scarlet Pimpernel" I observe that Chauvelin's eyes have apparently changed colour over the intervening years from 'pale yellow' to 'grey' (nowadays, of course, the mark of the Romantic Hero, but in Orczy's day it would have been blue ;-) And of course his atypical penchant for wearing simple black when the fashion was for peacock colours and expensive dyes would, a generation later, become the mark of exquisite taste. Clearly born out of his time :-p
But I'm afraid being short and scrawny has never been fashionable...