The Stars' Tennis Balls
Encyclopedia
The Stars' Tennis Balls is a psychological thriller
novel by Stephen Fry
, first published in 2000. In the United States, the title was changed to Revenge. In the Afterword to the 2003 American edition, Fry admits that the story "is a straight steal, virtually identical in all but period and style to Alexandre Dumas
's The Count of Monte Cristo
" but denies plagiarism, since Dumas also admits that the plot was taken from a contemporary urban legend.
, talented at sports and following in the footsteps of his father towards Oxford University, then a career in politics. He is happy and has fallen in love with a girl called Portia. But a few bizarre twists and turns of fate ensure that his life is turned upside down. As mentioned above, the plot is extremely similar to the story of The Count of Monte Cristo
.
's The Duchess of Malfi
. In full it reads: "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded which way please them."
" - "M'Colleague" being the name by which Fry and Hugh Laurie referred to each other in their TV sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie
.
The two respective cohorts are another schoolfriend called Rufus Cade, who is jealous of Maddstone's good looks and popularity, and Gordon Fendeman, the American cousin of Ned's girlfriend Portia, who dislikes him because he too is in love with Portia. Unfortunately, when Maddstone is arrested, the envelope that happens to be in his pocket, which was entrusted to him by a dying man employed by the school as a sailing instructor, turns out to be a coded message from the Irish Republican Army. He is whisked away from the police station by a smooth Secret Services operative called Oliver Delft, who listens calmly to Maddstone's explanation of events until he reveals the address to which he was asked to deliver the envelope – at which point things take another turn for the worse.
The address is that of Delft's mother and would reveal his hidden ancestral relationship to a Fenian
traitor, so he callously decides that Maddstone must disappear. Maddstone is beaten up, pumped full of drugs and taken away to a remote lunatic asylum which he later finds out is on an island off the coast of Sweden. For many years it is impressed on him by a Dr Mallo that his memories of his life as a person called Ned Maddstone are false and merely the product of a diseased mind. Then, just when he is starting to believe this mind-programming, he is finally allowed to fraternise with the other inmates. He begins regularly playing chess with a man known simply as Babe, who he soon discovers was also imprisoned in this hellish place by the British Government but has learned to cope with his situation by acting mad for the benefit of his captors even though he is perfectly sane and highly educated.
The two men become close friends and generally give each other hope. Babe agrees to educate Maddstone, helping him to play chess like a master and teaching him to speak several languages, including Swedish, although he keeps this a secret from the hospital staff. Eventually Maddstone realises he is indeed the son of Sir Charles Maddstone and with Babe's help works out through lateral thinking who it was who betrayed him and how, although he is still baffled as to why he was imprisoned on the island. When Ned mentions the name of Oliver Delft, Babe recalls a list of IRA sympathisers that he once saw very briefly and remembered due to his photographic memory, leading Ned to learn the true nature of the conspiracy. After some time Babe dies, having first devised a way in which his friend might escape to the mainland, which Maddstone duly does by hiding in Babe's coffin. He then sells some prescription drugs he has brought with him from the asylum and, as directed by Babe, travels to Switzerland, visits a certain bank and presents the details of an account in which Babe had deposited large sums of stolen money, which has by now accrued many years' worth of interest.
Maddstone thus becomes fabulously wealthy (to the tune of £324 million). Assuming the identity of Simon Cotter, he swiftly becomes famous as a mysterious internet entrepreneur, making huge profits by investing in high-risk ventures. He then returns to England and wreaks his revenge upon the four men responsible for his years of imprisonment by cleverly driving to their deaths Rufus Cade, Ashley Barson-Garland, Gordon Fendeman and Oliver Delft. When his task is complete he hopes to renew his relationship with Portia, but this is not to be. On discovering his identity Portia is horrified by the change in Maddstone's personality and flees with her son Albert after the death of her husband, Gordon Fendeman.
The novel ends with Cotter/Maddstone tearing up the old love letters he once sent to Portia as he returns to what he now realises is his only real 'home', the hospital on the island that he now owns.
. Fry states in the afterword that to make his novel appear more of a conscious homage, he changed the characters' names to anagrams or references to Dumas' work:
"This is an odd, interesting, ambitious book with a complex pedigree" and Harry Mount wrote of Fry in the Daily Telegraph "He seems to be concentrating more on producing a taut thriller. This he does to good effect, adding a talent for terror and suspense-writing to his quiverful of skills". However, Stephen Moss, writing in the Guardian
opined that it was a "good read rather than great book, pacy, well constructed and rather gruesome. If one were to make a criticism, one might say that it was a trifle banausian. It works like clockwork, but one does not buy a novel to tell the time."
As Revenge:
As Speelbal:
As Gudernes Kastebold:
Psychological thriller
Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...
novel by Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club. He first came to attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also...
, first published in 2000. In the United States, the title was changed to Revenge. In the Afterword to the 2003 American edition, Fry admits that the story "is a straight steal, virtually identical in all but period and style to Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
's The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is often considered to be, along with The Three Musketeers, Dumas's most popular work. He completed the work in 1844...
" but denies plagiarism, since Dumas also admits that the plot was taken from a contemporary urban legend.
Plot introduction
The main character, Ned (Edward) Maddstone, is a seventeen year old schoolboy who appears to be the sort of person for whom everything goes right. He is captain of schoolHead boy
Head Boy and Head Girl are terms commonly used in the British education system, and in private schools throughout the Commonwealth.-United Kingdom:...
, talented at sports and following in the footsteps of his father towards Oxford University, then a career in politics. He is happy and has fallen in love with a girl called Portia. But a few bizarre twists and turns of fate ensure that his life is turned upside down. As mentioned above, the plot is extremely similar to the story of The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is often considered to be, along with The Three Musketeers, Dumas's most popular work. He completed the work in 1844...
.
Explanation of the novel's title
The original title comes from a quotation taken from John WebsterJohn Webster
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates...
's The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play written by the English dramatist John Webster in 1612–13. It was first performed privately at the Blackfriars Theatre, then before a more general audience at The Globe, in 1613-14...
. In full it reads: "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded which way please them."
Dedication
The novel's dedication reads simply "To M'ColleagueHugh Laurie
James Hugh Calum Laurie, OBE , better known as Hugh Laurie , is an English actor, voice artist, comedian, writer, musician, recording artist, and director...
" - "M'Colleague" being the name by which Fry and Hugh Laurie referred to each other in their TV sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
A Bit of Fry & Laurie is a British sketch comedy television series starring former Cambridge Footlights members Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcast on both BBC1 and BBC2 between 1989 and 1995. It ran for four series and totalled 26 episodes, including a 35 minute pilot episode in 1987.As in The...
.
Plot summary
Things begin to go wrong for the main character when his schoolfriend Ashley Barson-Garland discovers that Maddstone has secretly read part of his diary and therefore knows his dark secret, namely that he is ashamed of his working class roots. The clever Barson-Garland plots the downfall of Maddstone and joins forces with two others in a plot to get him arrested for possession of marijuana.The two respective cohorts are another schoolfriend called Rufus Cade, who is jealous of Maddstone's good looks and popularity, and Gordon Fendeman, the American cousin of Ned's girlfriend Portia, who dislikes him because he too is in love with Portia. Unfortunately, when Maddstone is arrested, the envelope that happens to be in his pocket, which was entrusted to him by a dying man employed by the school as a sailing instructor, turns out to be a coded message from the Irish Republican Army. He is whisked away from the police station by a smooth Secret Services operative called Oliver Delft, who listens calmly to Maddstone's explanation of events until he reveals the address to which he was asked to deliver the envelope – at which point things take another turn for the worse.
The address is that of Delft's mother and would reveal his hidden ancestral relationship to a Fenian
Fenian
The Fenians , both the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood , were fraternal organisations dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic in the 19th and early 20th century. The name "Fenians" was first applied by John O'Mahony to the members of the Irish republican...
traitor, so he callously decides that Maddstone must disappear. Maddstone is beaten up, pumped full of drugs and taken away to a remote lunatic asylum which he later finds out is on an island off the coast of Sweden. For many years it is impressed on him by a Dr Mallo that his memories of his life as a person called Ned Maddstone are false and merely the product of a diseased mind. Then, just when he is starting to believe this mind-programming, he is finally allowed to fraternise with the other inmates. He begins regularly playing chess with a man known simply as Babe, who he soon discovers was also imprisoned in this hellish place by the British Government but has learned to cope with his situation by acting mad for the benefit of his captors even though he is perfectly sane and highly educated.
The two men become close friends and generally give each other hope. Babe agrees to educate Maddstone, helping him to play chess like a master and teaching him to speak several languages, including Swedish, although he keeps this a secret from the hospital staff. Eventually Maddstone realises he is indeed the son of Sir Charles Maddstone and with Babe's help works out through lateral thinking who it was who betrayed him and how, although he is still baffled as to why he was imprisoned on the island. When Ned mentions the name of Oliver Delft, Babe recalls a list of IRA sympathisers that he once saw very briefly and remembered due to his photographic memory, leading Ned to learn the true nature of the conspiracy. After some time Babe dies, having first devised a way in which his friend might escape to the mainland, which Maddstone duly does by hiding in Babe's coffin. He then sells some prescription drugs he has brought with him from the asylum and, as directed by Babe, travels to Switzerland, visits a certain bank and presents the details of an account in which Babe had deposited large sums of stolen money, which has by now accrued many years' worth of interest.
Maddstone thus becomes fabulously wealthy (to the tune of £324 million). Assuming the identity of Simon Cotter, he swiftly becomes famous as a mysterious internet entrepreneur, making huge profits by investing in high-risk ventures. He then returns to England and wreaks his revenge upon the four men responsible for his years of imprisonment by cleverly driving to their deaths Rufus Cade, Ashley Barson-Garland, Gordon Fendeman and Oliver Delft. When his task is complete he hopes to renew his relationship with Portia, but this is not to be. On discovering his identity Portia is horrified by the change in Maddstone's personality and flees with her son Albert after the death of her husband, Gordon Fendeman.
The novel ends with Cotter/Maddstone tearing up the old love letters he once sent to Portia as he returns to what he now realises is his only real 'home', the hospital on the island that he now owns.
Allusions/references to other works
The story mirrors that of The Count of Monte CristoThe Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is often considered to be, along with The Three Musketeers, Dumas's most popular work. He completed the work in 1844...
. Fry states in the afterword that to make his novel appear more of a conscious homage, he changed the characters' names to anagrams or references to Dumas' work:
| Monte Cristo | Stars' Tennis Balls | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Edmond Dantès Edmond Dantès Edmond Dantès is the protagonist and title character of Alexandre Dumas, père's novel, The Count of Monte Cristo.Dumas may have gotten the idea for the character of Edmond from a story which he found in a book compiled by Jacques Peuchet, archivist to the French police. Peuchet related the tale of... |
Ned Maddstone | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
| Mercedes | Portia | pun Pun The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,... : Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz is a German manufacturer of automobiles, buses, coaches, and trucks. Mercedes-Benz is a division of its parent company, Daimler AG... → Porsche Porsche Porsche Automobil Holding SE, usually shortened to Porsche SE a Societas Europaea or European Public Company, is a German based holding company with investments in the automotive industry.... |
| de Villefort | Oliver Delft | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
| the Abbe (Faria) | the Babe (Fraser) | partial anagram |
| Fernand Mondego | Gordon Fendeman | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
| Noirtier | Blackrow | translated literally (calque Calque In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:... ) |
| Capt. Leclere | Paddy Leclare | homonym Homonym In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that often but not necessarily share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings... |
| Caderousse | Rufus Cade | translation: rousse = red Red Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared , and cannot be seen by the naked eye... = Rufus |
| Baron Danglars | Barson-Garland | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
| Monte Cristo | Simon Cotter | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
| Albert de Morcerf | Albert Fendeman | homonym Homonym In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that often but not necessarily share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings... |
| Abbé | Babe | anagram Anagram An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who... |
Literary significance and criticism
Reviews of the book were good. Jane Shilling declared in The TimesThe Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
"This is an odd, interesting, ambitious book with a complex pedigree" and Harry Mount wrote of Fry in the Daily Telegraph "He seems to be concentrating more on producing a taut thriller. This he does to good effect, adding a talent for terror and suspense-writing to his quiverful of skills". However, Stephen Moss, writing in the Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
opined that it was a "good read rather than great book, pacy, well constructed and rather gruesome. If one were to make a criticism, one might say that it was a trifle banausian. It works like clockwork, but one does not buy a novel to tell the time."
Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
- Fry exploits the fact that Maddstone is sheltered from society for eighteen years to show how it has changed in that time. His character is at first ignorant of mobile phone technology and does not know that Germany has reformed into a single country.
- Ashley Barson-Garland says at one stage "The Blessed Margaret already feels like a distant dream does she not? His Toniness, too, will disappear into the vacuum of history in a twinkling". He is referring of course to Margaret ThatcherMargaret ThatcherMargaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
and Tony BlairTony BlairAnthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
respectively. - In the latter part of the novel Fry makes allusions to possible attempts by government and/or private enterprise to control the internet.
Release details
As The Stars' Tennis Balls:- 2000, UK, Hutchinson, ISBN 0-09-180151-6, 28 September 2000, Hardback
- 2001, UK, Arrow ISBN 0-09-972741-2, November 1 2001, Paperback
As Revenge:
- 2002, USA, Random House Inc., Hardback
- 2003, USA, Random House Inc., ISBN 0-8129-6819-0, Paperback
As Speelbal:
- 2001, Belgium and The Netherlands, Thomas Rap, ISBN 90 6005 727 9, Paperback
As Gudernes Kastebold:
- 2002, DK, Lindhardt og Ringhof, ISBN 978-87-595-1658-4, Stapled / Paperback