41 out of 41 people found this review helpful.
Bastille Day w/o: Lurking in the shadow of the guillotine
Date of Review: Jul 20, 2001
The Bottom Line: A good old-fashioned adventure with unabashedly royalist leanings, but still an enjoyable, light read.
This is my week-late contribution to pambo's Bastille Day write-off. Due to the disorganization of moving and not being able to find my books, it's taken me this long to scrabble up something related to France. Luckily for me, I remembered we had a copy of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, conveniently set in 1792 at the height of the French Revolution. Please accept this late entry with my humblest apologies!
The Story
It's 1792 and the heads of French aristocrats are rolling left and right, thanks to the zealous mobs and the creation of the guillotine. But the French police are up in arms due to the escape of many condemned aristocrats to London. The culprit is a daring Englishman known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel, because he leaves behind a single red bloom (the pimpernel) and signs his notes with the same design. All of English society knows of the SP, but none know his true identity save for a select few.
And what could be a better disguise for a clever scoundrel than an absent-minded, foppish nobleman? Sir Percy Blackeney is just that, a man whose tall frame and good looks are marred by his tendency of inane laughter and scatter-brained thinking. No one suspects him of being the infamous SP, not even his estranged wife, Marguerite, who is a famous French actress and touted as the cleverest woman in England. But things come to a head when Marguerite is blackmailed by a French spy, M. Chauvelin, to be an informant and figure out the SP's identity...or her brother, Armand St. Juste will pay for her disobedience with his life.
The Good Stuff
Really, what's not to like? The Scarlet Pimpernel is adventure, plain and simple. Sir Percy is a blundering idiot whom few people suspect of being able to tie his own shoes, let alone rescue and smuggle aristocrats across the channel to safety. In many ways, he's a James Bond figure, only frivolous rather than suave. During the book, you find that his exterior is an excellent cover, and allows him to indulge in all sorts of disguises and trickery to fool his enemies.
Probably my favorite anecdote was one Orczy leads off with in the start of the book, in order to illustrate what kind of man the SP is. In Paris, aristocrats are desperately trying to flee the country, even though guards are posted at every gate. A Sergeant Bibot of the French army recalls an incident where a man with a cartload of wine casks was allowed through the gate after the casks were inspected and found empty. Half an hour later, a captain and squad of soldiers come running up, demanding if the gate guards have seen the man driving the cartful of casks. The guard is horrified to hear that the casks held not wine or empty air but the Duc de Chalis and his family as they fled the city! But wait, Sergeant Bibot pauses in his tale, here is Orczy's twist: The Scarlet Pimpernel was not the man driving the cart, he was the captain of the guards, and his "soldiers" were all disguised aristocrats. That infernally clever English devil!
Okay, I didn't say it was subtle, just adventurous. And it got the book off to a fine start, since it gave me an idea of what to expect. Hopefully, this should give you an idea of what to expect, too--you're not going to find terribly complex storylines here.
There is a rather nice subplot about the romance between Sir Percy and Marguerite. They're a rather odd couple in English society, he having a reputation for stupidity and she famed for her wit and beauty. But Percy was once madly in love with Marguerite, and she agreed to marry him because she prized such unconditional love and devotion. After they are wed, an incident where Marguerite is blamed for the deaths of an aristocratic family drives a wedge between the two. Percy now only behaves civilly--even affectionately--in public, and detached and cold in private. Likewise, Marguerite constantly ridicules her husband for his slow wits, but secretly yearns for the past where he loved her more than anything in the world. This plot is interwoven quite nicely with the rising action as the Pimpernel sneaks back to France in order to rescue Armand St. Juste and is pursued by the French army.
Minor flaws
Probably the greatest fault people could find is the story's lack of complexity. This is purely a good guys vs. bad guys book. Emma Orczy was born in 1865 into the Hungarian nobility. She witnessed first hand a small peasant uprising which destroyed her family home, and later moved with her family to London, where she became a writer and married a Baron.
This no doubt has influenced her viewpoint on the revolution. She is obviously biased in favor of the aristocrats in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and her portrayals of the French police are less than flattering. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a hero you can definitely root for, a gentleman in every sense of the word as well as a courageous rebel. Even Marguerite is a sympathetic character, particularly after she has a change of heart and sets off on her own heroic quest to save her husband and brother from the clutches of the Evil French. On the other hand, Chauvelin is a thoroughly despicable villain with no redeeming qualities, and a similar character of Sergeant Bibot is clearly portrayed as a sadist who liked to play mind games with his victims.
Still, Orczy isn't too terribly ham-handed with her real point, and it is a good one--that innocent people died on the guillotine merely for being rich and having titles, and that men, women and children were killed indiscriminately in the name of the cause.
If you can overlook its simplicity and just enjoy the story for what it is, there really aren't many flaws. Some small ones are that in the beginning is a tiny bit slow before Orczy introduces her main characters of Sir Percy and the Lady Marguerite. The author spends a little too much time on characters in the inn who have little significance to the overall plot, and it drags down the novel's beginning. The pace quickly picks up afterward and doesn't really stop until the end, a dramatic nighttime confrontation above the cliffs of Dover. (I think. It's late and my geography stinks.) The ending also comes to a fairly predictable resolution.
Oh, yes, and people (particularly Percy) say things like, "Odd's fish!", "Zounds!" and "Zooks!" a lot, which may or may not be authentic, but makes them sound like they're from another planet and have only learned English via bad high school French textbooks.
Recommendations
People don't often look to the classics for light summer reads, but this would do just fine. It's an easy read, entertaining, and you don't need to know much about the history of the French revolution in order to grasp the situation and plotline. And hey, won't this look more impressive lying on your beach towel than the latest bodice-ripper?
For other epinions in the Bastille Day w/o, please see:
eplovejoy
kent4489
sweetcece
DanneC
Bryan Carey
MtBat
PeterRuden
GreatPilgrim
Solleks
Robinlynn
Robinmichele
buffoonery
Sloucho
PurpleWiz
Ifif1938
Stephen_Murray
Epicure
Dequebec
Rich2003dm
Jiahong
Quasar
2buzy
mkp51
MariaEkaterina
Yzerman
Redhowell
tlimjoco
Whitty
29th_Candidate
Note: I had originally wanted to review Rosalind Laker's To Dance with Kings, a hefty volume of historical fiction also set during the period of the French revolution that covers three generations of women in France who rose from peasant to waiting-in-lady to none other than Marie Antoinette. It was published in 1988, and unfortunately, Epinions doesn't have it in their database. I do recommend it (and other works by Rosalind Laker) for people who love historical fiction with a generous dollop of romance. She's done excellent research into her time period and each of her books usually features a unique type of artisan skill. In To Dance with Kings, it is the art of fan-making.
