Alexandre Dumas: swashbuckling musketeers are only half the story

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/alexandre-dumas-swashbuckling-musketeers-half-story

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Almost everything is wrong about the first episode of the 10-part BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers, which starts on Sunday. Played by Luke Pasqualino, 23, its D'Artagnan is no teenager (the novel calls him "Don Quixote at 18"), and is not marked out by accent as a Gascon. The Musketeers's opening sequence meddles with Alexandre Dumas's beginning so it resembles a modern movie thriller's violent prologue, thereby distorting D'Artagnan's motivation when he meets and joins Aramis, Athos and Porthos. Wintry rain and snow make his journey to Paris hazardous, although Dumas sets his initial chapters in April.

Equally prone to depart from the original are the scenes at the 1620s French court. Louis XIII, idle and petulant, is a cartoonish king from Horrible Histories, while his queen, Anne of Austria, looks and sounds – as does Pasqualino's male model-like hero – like a Made in Chelsea character (in Dumas her foreignness is a key plot point). Ambiguous in the novel, chief minister Cardinal Richelieu becomes lecherous and lethal, executing or personally killing anyone no longer of use to him.

For some viewers, though, the adaptation's biggest shock will be seeing D'Artagnan and his new friends firing pistols. Although Dumas's musketeers presumably owned muskets, he's clearly keen to restrict these belated exemplars of medieval chivalry to sword-fighting, knowing that having guns around would be fatal to swashbuckling.

In being consistently unfaithful to the novel, however, The Musketeers is at least faithful to the tradition of unfaithful Dumas adaptations: even when they stick roughly to his plot, the dozens of movie and TV versions (from the silent era to Paul WS Anderson's 2011 film) usually do their best to mess it around with bizarre casting, Americanisation, anachronistic dialogue and so on. There are also musical, cowboy, ninja and Foreign Legion versions, plus cartoons featuring dog and cat musketeers, Disney characters and – in an all-female tale – Barbie. Adapters arguably feel so free to play fast and loose because they view Dumas as a pulp writer: the king of pulp, perhaps – near unique in having created not one but two enduring characters, D'Artagnan and the avenging Count – but nevertheless essentially a purveyor of adventure yarns.

What that ignores is that he's also a seminal historical novelist, as interested in political intrigue as swashbuckling. The three D'Artagnan novels, which together cover around 40 years, are part of a piecemeal but ambitious chronicle of French history that stretches from the 1570s of La Reine Margot to the 1820s and 30s of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Using fighting, bed-hopping and court soap operas as reader-bait is one part of Dumas's influence on subsequent historical fiction, but less recognised is the debt of later authors to his depiction of the powerful. The Three Musketeers exemplifies how he shifts away from Shakespeare's direct portrayal of kings to centring his novels on subordinate figures who have close-up access to them – something that's become the template for books leading up to today's novels by, for example, CJ Sansom, Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel. Mantel's Cromwell is a far more complex creation than Dumas's Richelieu, but he's clearly descended from him.

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