The Man in the Iron Mask

It would actually be correct to refer to this book as The Three Musketeers III, Part 3. That's a lot of threes. (Three.) After Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers, he followed it up with two sequels, uncreativlely titled Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. That third book, The Vicomte of Bragleonne, is so long that it is typically split into three parts published and sold separately in the modern day. And so the 600-page third part of The Three Musketeers III is none other than this book, The Man in the Iron Mask. Now, I'd never read The Three Musketeers, let alone its sequel or the first two parts of Vicomte, so from the start this book was a challenge for me. Not because the prose was heavy or antiquated or the subject matter difficult to understand, but because all of the main characters had already been introduced in the previous 2,000 pages or so of the Musketeers saga. So when long time friends and fellow musketeers D'Artagan and Aramis found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, it meant nothing to me. That said, I'm not regretting skipping out on those first 2,000 pages or so. Maybe someday I'll return to the original Three Musketeers story (an old classic), but at the moment my backlog is Dumas-free and I'll try to keep it that way for a while. Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks. This book was slightly disappointing, but that's primarily because it didn't match my expectations. Again, I didn't even know this was a continuation of The Three Musketeers until I began reading it. But I did expect the titular man (in the iron mask) to be an important character in the book. I wasn't expecting a deep psychological thriller or anything, but I figured there'd be something symbolic in there about a man slowly losing his sense of identity after he's sentenced to spend the rest of his life wearing an iron mask. Instead, after said sentence is decreed, we never hear from him again. The very cover image seen above depicts a scene we never see in the book; we only know the man in the iron mask before he is doomed to wear the iron mask. Oh well. Misleading title and cover aside, this was a decent story. People who've read the blog before know that I've dabbled with plenty of 19th century literature here and that I've had very mixed results. This was certainly one of the easier-to-stomach pieces from that era. Maybe it's because the original was written in French and translations hold up much better than 19th century English. Either way, a decent but ultimately forgettable story. Do it right and start with The Three Musketeers and only keep going if you feel particularly attached to the characters and the writing style.