The Three Musketeers

Maybe 3 to 3.5 stars. Entertaining enough, but overall riddled with so much time-period-specific issues that are too prominent for me to sweep under the carpet while reading with my modern lenses, and everything/everyone felt like a gender-role caricature, not even just a stereotype.

d'Artagnan is a young Gascon who travels to Paris to fulfil his life's ambition - to be part of the Musketeers. Along the way, his letter of recommendation from his father to the Treville, the Captain of the Musketeers, is stolen by a mysterious man. As such, d'Artagnan is instead assigned to the King's Guards, but becomes fast friends with three musketeers that he meets and fights along the way, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. Their friendship tides them over the various challenges and plots that they uncover being laid out by the Cardinal Richelieu and his own guards, who have historically been the enemies of the Musketeers.

There's really not much to say in terms of plot - everything feels rather episodic in nature (which probably makes a lot more sense given that it was serialised when originally published) and there isn't really an overarching hook to it all, except maybe a vague sense that the four friends are defending themselves against various hidden enemies.

The biggest issue when it came to reading the book was how much the characters felt like caricatures of gender stereotypes of that age. The three (or four) musketeers come across as huge tools overall. They randomly gamble precious horses and equipment away for no good reason, randomly fall in love with any pretty face and then come up with schemes to try to sleep with said women, or just spout a ton of misogynistic philosophies. In the opening few chapters, d'Artaganan was willing to duel with anyone who judged him for the colour of the horse that he sits on.

The female characters were decidedly worse, either being entirely too easily won over by a few sentences of professed love from men, and then becoming massively attached to them to the point of aiding and abetting their nefarious schemes against other people (both men and women), or being ridiculously evil and villainous. Surprisingly enough, the main villain in this story was probably one of the female characters and not, in fact, the Cardinal or Rochefort as I had gone in expecting. She is described as entirely lacking in any sort of feeling, and, of course, being only a woman, she falls back on her womanly wily ways of utilising temptation and seduction to lure all these good, honourable men to their downfalls. It's not an accident that she's compared to your classic serpent more than once.

So if it wasn't enough that I couldn't find myself rooting for any one character in the book, I also couldn't root for any relationship in the book either. Almost every romance in the book is extra-marital and almost always founded on either insta-lust or avarice, in the case of Porthos sticking with his (married) mistress for the sake of accessing her husband's riches. Of course, the narrative points out and laughs at this said mistress for being old (50+ years old) and not handsome, and she is described as being a complete sucker for Porthos.

Possibly the main relationship of the book, d'Artagnan's love for Mme. Bonacieux, the young wife of a middle-aged mercer, is founded on a classic “love at first sight” moment. Aside from perhaps two or three meetings in which they barely spend any time getting to know each other, they barely meet for most of the book, but yet so much of the plot is driven by their “relationship” which is hard to believe. It also makes it hard to root for when, throughout this time, d'Artagnan isn't impervious to the charms of other women, and actively courts and sleeps with them. It is only when he realises that his other amours aren't quite who they seemed they were that he suddenly recalls his love for Mme. Bonacieux.

I can't help comparing this book with the Count of Monte Cristo, which was the first Dumas I read and not too long ago. While I thought there had been problems with female characters in COMC, it wasn't quite as bad as in this one. I get that this was all written in the 1840s and I generally try to close one or even both eyes to these time-specific issues (which I did for COMC in rating it 5 stars), but the ones in this book were really hard to ignore for some reason. Further, I felt like COMC had an overarching plot that I could get really invested in and every chapter felt like a purposeful step towards an ending that I was really interested in witnessing. This wasn't the case for The Three Musketeers though, which felt like episodic adventures of four man-boys.