Historical Fiction

A meleancholy ending to a spectacular series. ( )

Here's what I read after reading in 1987: "More appropriate title would have been "The Three Musketeers, The Sequel". The four musketeers, twenty years later, interact in the court of France. Aramis is powerful and masterminds a plot to replace the king. D'Artagnan is the loayl, high-ranking soldier of the kind who must pursue the guilty Aramis, whose plot fails miserably. Athos and Porthos are secondary characters." ( )

I was reluctant to read this due to the ubiquity of the Musketeers and because for whatever reason i had assumed Dumas to be a high-brow difficult author. Boy was i wrong, this had such an easy almost pulpy tone to it, perhaps a tad hard to parse during some dialogue but overall very smooth and a nice style.
I was in, the first 20% was 5-stars even with some interruptions to worldbuild, but then after a climax it suddenly switches characters. Which it will continue to do throughout the novel as there isn't actually any main character. Its a terrible structure where the momentum drops at each switch and has to start to build up again. Still Dumas manages to make it work, and the awful structure does at least mean you never know what might happen next.
Dumas even gets some use out of Raoul, the most worthless of side characters, in his first major section at least.
So not 5-stars but still a solid 4... until we reach the conclusion, if i can use that term since its about 10 chapters long. One major character the King! goes through a complete personality switch for no reason and the rest is just turgid wrapping up and politic history lessons and absolutely none of it has anything to do with the actual title of the book.

An 80% of good to great with a soft squidgy mess at the end. Like driving a sports car into a swamp. ( )

I enjoyed the series, but this book less than the others. It needed better editing to keep the story moving forward. I guess when some authors (more recently like JK Rowling) become so big their editors have a harder time standing up to them.

Librivox ( )