Captain Pamphile

Captain Pamphile – Alexandre Dumas; tr. Andrew Brown, 1843911345

This is a novella by the author of The Three Musketeers. I read the first couple hundred pages of The Count of Monte Cristo about 40 years ago (I can’t believe it either), so reading about the adventures of the ruthless Captain Pamphile reminded me that Dumas had a high degree of vitality and imagination. As a storyteller, a master of animated narration, Dumas is hard to match. Also, like the colors and visuals in say, SpongeBob Squarepants, Dumas’ word paintings in its settings were so vibrant, so tangible, that I can forgive improbabilities and allusions I’ll never understand.

Captain Pamphile, a Provençal sea captain, captures wild animals to sell to Parisians for their menageries of curious creatures. He takes the role of a beast to his crew and a ferocious predator to the animals in order to serve a market of idle fashionistas. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera said "Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals." Dumas lets the narration of events make his point that cruelty, especially toward the vulnerable, is a noxious mix of greed, egotism, and willful stupidity.

Darkly funny episodes reek of the rough and tumble humor of late 18^th and early 19^th century. Coarse incidents will strike us modern readers as harsh, making us recall that the past really is a different country, with a different language and mores. But the violence also impressed me like an American tall tale, so improbable that it is impossible to get upset. It would be like getting outraged over Roadrunner blowing up Wile E. Coyote yet again.

Oxford World Classics and New York Review of Books reissue fairly well-known classics in beautiful editions with informative forwards and notes, but Hesperus Classics reissues minor works by great authors (like this one) or unjustly neglected works by forgotten authors. Reading in general but reading neglected fiction in particular appeals to the snob in me. I’ve read stories by Conan Doyle that don’t star Sherlock Holmes! And you haven’t! Nyah-nyah!