A modern re-telling of Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution. The rivetting melodrama of a latter-day anarchist Count of Monte Cristo, Cristóbal Pinzón, a young Andalucian boy whose childhood is coloured by his father’s ruin and his family’s immiseration by three unscrupulous Englishmen and a Welshman (no Scotsmen, thankfully!). A lively page-turning but well-paced yarn of fraud, financial jiggery-pokery, revenge, radicalisation— as well as being an illuminating romp through forty-odd years of Spanish and European culture and history to the opening shots of the Spanish Civil War. It is also about one man’s determination to bring about the social revolution by destroying capitalism from within — practically single-handedly! It was, after all, he, Cristóbal, who triggered the stock-market crash of 1929!

I know nothing about the earlier or subsequent literary career of William Blake, but if THE WORLD IS MINE is anything to go by he was a fascinating character with a profound empathy and understanding of anarchist ideas and principles, at least as expressed through the actions and dialogue of his cultured, idealistic-yet-worldly Byronic protagonist, Cristóbal Pinzón, a cosmopolitan libertarian caped crusader given to deep philosophising, speaking in polysyllables, crisp ironic sentences, and plotting social revolution. Cristóbal’s fiscal high-jinks and complex schemes of spectacularly appropriate vengeance are remarkably plausible in detail; it is also a scathing indictment of Western civilisation, part of the story behind the Spanish Civil War and a handy vade mecum to capitalism and high culture. A rare classic, hard to put down