Rant Review: The Scarlet Pimpernel
A lesson in trusting blurbs
Title: The Scarlet Pimpernel. Author: Baroness Orczy. Original date of publication: 1905. Pages: 275. Genre: historical fiction/classics.
I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers to know as little as possible about a fictional book before reading it in order to avoid seeing spoilers or being influenced by others’ opinions.
The Scarlet Pimpernel is the latest in a series of recent reads which has made me re-evaluate whether this is really the best strategy.
I found the novel in one of the strangest and best bookshops I’ve visited. This floating library selling second-hand books didn’t seem to have any organised shelving system, so I came away with some books that would normally be in sections I wouldn’t browse in a regular bookshop.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy was one of these, although I didn’t realise to what extent this was true at the time because the blurb is rather misleading:
The thrilling story of an aristocratic hero with a double life, The Scarlet Pimpernel set the standard for all tales of masked avengers that would follow.
It is the height of the Terror in Paris, and few can escape la guillotine. Yet, somehow, an elusive Englishman is rescuing imprisoned noblemen and spiriting them across the Channel to safety — a dazzling swordsman and escape artist, known only by the red flower on his calling card, the Scarlet Pimpernel…**
Sound kind of cheesy, I thought. Nevertheless, it seemed like it could be a quick, fun read. I was wrong — finishing this book was a struggle.
The story takes place in Autumn 1792. The first chapter sets the scene in Paris at this time: the people are ruthlessly hunting down any aristocrats attempting to flee the city and cheering as they are killed a hundred at a time.
It is also here that the enigmatic scarlet pimpernel first appears. He facilitates the escape of family of aristocrats by disguising himself as an old woman with a cart in which the family are hiding.
As a reader, this escape left me keen to find out exactly how the “masked avenger” had carried out the escape — a question which frustratingly remains unanswered throughout the novel. In fact, no explanation is ever given as to how the scarlet pimpernel successfully disguises himself time after time.
And that’s ignoring the fact that he’s not an avenger at all, but a people smuggler.
The next chapter shifts the scene to an inn in Dover and introduces the reader to the political and social situation in England during the French Revolution. Orczy achieves this through conversations going on in the inn as the innkeeper awaits the arrival of some aristocratic guests.
So far, so good — the kind of slow introduction anyone who’s used to reading classics expects.
Things start to get a little more exciting when the important guests arrive. To avoid just recounting the whole plot, I’ll skip to the main source of my frustration with this novel: Marguerite Blakeney.
One of the guests is the French lady Marguerite Blakeney, née St Just, the wife of Sir Percy Blakeney, who is the richest man in England. Marguerite is admired by all for her intelligence and her beauty, having been the centre of the social scene in Paris before her marriage. Now she and her husband are the most fashionable people in London society.
The narrator quickly hones in on Marguerite, the “cleverest woman in Europe” (an assertion which is repeated over and over throughout the story).
Soon after their marriage, Percy and Marguerite essentially fell out of love after he discovered that she denounced her relatives to the republican authorities in France, resulting in the death of a whole family.
The reader is expected to feel sympathy for her after learning that she didn’t intend them to die. However, her habit of making fun of her husband, who everyone regards as a “stupid, dull Englishman” (p.44**), in public at every opportunity makes her very unlikeable, even if the reader can forgive a serious mistake she made in her youth.
And this is a major problem, since she turns out to be the protagonist.
I was expecting a story about the adventures of a man risking his life to save others from danger, but instead I found myself reading a novel focused on the emotional life of an proud and vain woman.
The plot moves forward as Marguerite is blackmailed by an old acquaintance, Chauvelin, from France into helping him discover the identity of the scarlet pimpernel. If she doesn’t help him, Chauvelin will have her brother put to death.
I found Chauvelin a convincing villain and the moral dilemma with which Marguerite is faced a compelling one: should she help capture the scarlet pimpernel, leading to his death and the deaths of people he would save in the future, or should she allow her brother to die to save a stranger?
It is in the chapters where this dilemma is played out that Marguerite shows some intelligence, quickly coming up with a plan to find the information she needs to discover the scarlet pimpernel’s identity.
However, it is also here that I began to find her unbelievably stupid and frustrating. I’ll give you a warning: I’m about to get into major spoilers.
Marguerite discovers that the scarlet pimpernel will be in a certain location at a certain time and passes the information on to Chauvelin. The Frenchman goes to catch the scarlet pimpernel and the only person there is Percy, asleep on a sofa in the corner.
That Marguerite, the “cleverest woman in Europe”, can’t put this together with some other clues (which I won’t go into here) to realise that her husband is the scarlet pimpernel until much later certainly doesn’t make her seem very intelligent.
I found this such a shame because, for the most part, the beginning of the novel was well-written: Orczy uses tone masterfully to guide the reader’s interpretation of events and many descriptive passages contain beautiful imagery.
At the start, the novel was a pleasure to read. It was well-paced, the cast of characters were interesting enough and the plot centred on some complex moral issues.
However, about halfway through, the writing quality just falls off a cliff.
Besides being repeatedly told that Marguerite is very intelligent but being given little substance to back this up, the main issue is pace.
If the pace of a novel slows to a crawl, any sense of urgency in the plot is bound to die out. That is exactly what happens in the second half of The Scarlet Pimpernel. The other, related, issue is the unnecessary repetition of the same phrases over and over again.
But before getting to that, I want to touch on a rather bizarre incident which made me think “wtf did I just read?”
About halfway through the novel, Marguerite and Percy have a conversation which causes them both to realise they still love each other.
The weird part is what Percy does once Marguerite has left:
He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love, and as soon as her light footstep had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last. (p.143**).
Perhaps this would have seemed romantic to Orczy’s original early 20th-century readership, but to me it comes across as a bit pathetic and kind of unhinged, as well as completely out of place.
Surely she could have thought of a better gesture to show Percy’s love for his wife?
Shortly after this incident, Marguerite finally realises Percy is the scarlet pimpernel and falls headfirst in love with him again. This sudden change in emotions comes across as poor writing.
In fact, it seems like their estrangement in the first place was a convenient way to make her unaware of his second identity.
Then, as soon as it suits the progression of the plot, Marguerite realises she’s in love with him after all. Percy has set off to France to carry out another rescue as the scarlet pimpernel with Chauvelin hot on his heels, ready to catch him and send him to the guillotine.
Marguerite rushes to warn Percy of the danger. This is fair enough, but a few times the narrator emphasises the Marguerite would be happy to die with Percy as some bizarre romantic gesture.
This is such a dramatic change that makes Marguerite seem rather unstable and not the cool-headed and logic woman the reader is told she is. Again, the show and the tell elements of Orczy’s character writing just don’t add up.
I can’t help but think Orczy only does this to justify her main character travelling to France to place her where the climactic action will occur. The better solution, in my opinion, would have been to follow Percy, Chauvelin or Marguerite’s brother Armand who are closer to the action.
Orczy’s narration followed several different characters in the early chapters, so why can’t it shift again?
From this point onwards, Marguerite is on the periphery of the plot, so the reader is too.
What is more, easily 30 pages could be cut from this novel but removing the tedious repetitions of the same phrases again and again that describe Marguerite’s emotional anguish as she comes to terms with having betrayed her husband and wondering whether she can reach him before his enemies capture him.
This makes the pace frustratingly slow.
Ultimately, I was disappointed by this book because it did not match my expectations, which were based on the blurb.
This novel is less an action adventure story than a poorly executed romance. The reader barely gets a glimpse of the scarlet pimpernel’s exploits and there’s not a single sword fight in the whole novel. Essentially, I feel scammed by false advertising.
The novel was originally a stage play, so spectators were probably spared Marguerite’s excessive navel-gazing, which would do wonders for the pace.
Additionally, maybe Penguin, more than Orczy, is to blame for spectacularly misrepresenting the plot on the cover of the edition I bought.
I don’t regret reading this novel. Despite its flaws, I was invested enough in the story to keep reading until the end.
But from now on I don’t think I’ll be trusting blurbs to give me an accurate idea of what to expect from a book.
** the blurb and page numbers are quoted from the 2018 Penguin English Library edition.
