The Count of Monte Cristo, All the King's Men

I finished, coincidentally, two very long books at about the same time, one on audible and one on the kindle.  I think that each of them is also marketed as a kind of book that they're not.

Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is often called one of the great adventure novels, but I think that readers looking for adventure would find it a long slog.  Instead, it's a novel about revenge and obsession.  Edmond Dantes is wrongly imprisoned for life, but ends up escaping and finding a source of (essentially) infinite wealth.  Where many of us might choose to live up the high life (living well is the best revenge, as they say), he devotes the next nine years of his life to destroying the men who imprisoned him, as well as their families.

In some ways, the very length of the book is a part of its moral vision.  We have to watch Dantes' steps as he slowly sets up his plans in order to realize with him that, in fact, he doesn't have the moral standing to declare himself the agent of God and bring down suffering on evil men.  As he attempts to do so, he finds that he wounds innocent people, including the son of his biggest benefactor.  If the book were significantly shorter, I don't think that this insight would have the impact that it needs -- the whole point is that Dantes is so obsessed with his revenge that he can see nothing else.

All the King's Men is often presented as a political novel, but I think that that's a mistaken view -- there's very little politics in the novel, even though it's about a Huey Long-like character.  We see almost nothing of his rise to power, never see any of his wheeling and dealing or what makes him such a political force.  At its heart, the novel is a morality tale.  The moral vision of All the King's Men is much darker than Monte Cristo's.  The novel seems to have a very Calvinist morality at its core -- everyone is tainted by original sin, and there is no good person who doesn't have some evil at his core.

The hospital that Willy Stark wants to build is the perfect symbol of this version.  He wants to leave one pure monument, even as he's compromised everything else he's ever touched, and resists any attempt to curry favor with political donors who want contracts to build it.  In the end, though, he finds that he has to make that compromise in order to be elected to the Senate.  When he decides to keep his hospital pure, his second-in-command engineers Stark's death by the only "noble" person in the novel -- thus spelling the end of the hospital.  The symbol is clear; the hospital was too pure to exist in this fallen world, and only the compromised can succeed.