Review: The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Action films, with their fight scenes, jump cuts, and triumphant soundtracks, have a history, too, of course, and The Prisoner Zenda is clearly a major work in the series:

Then I heard the clash of crossed swords and a tramp of feet and--I cannot tell the thing so quickly as it happened, for all seemed to come at once. There was an angry cry from madame's room,
the cry of a wounded man; the window was flung open; young Rupert stood there sword in hand. He turned his back, and I saw his body go forward to the lunge. "Ah, Johann, there's one for you! Come on, Michael!"

One of my students recently discovered the term "swashbuckling" and asked about its usage; I can now refer him specifically to the villain here, Rupert Hentzau:

Leaning forward, he tossed his hair off his forehead and smiled, and said: "Au revoir, Rudolf Rassendyll!"

Then, with his cheek streaming blood, but his lips laughing and his body swaying with ease and grace, he bowed to me; and he bowed to the farm-girl, who had drawn near in trembling fascination, and he waved his hand to Fritz, who was just within range and let fly a shot at him. The ball came nigh doing its work, for it struck the sword he held, and he dropped the sword with an oath, wringing his fingers and clapped his heels hard on his horse's belly, and rode away at a gallop.

And I watched him go down the long avenue, riding as though he rode for his pleasure and singing as he went, for all there was that gash in his cheek.

Marvelous! The conflict here ends mano-a-mano, a fantasy of power struggle pitting honor against villainy, light against the dark, and the implication that the universe is a consistent, even godly sort of place where the good will ultimately triumph over evil.

But it's notable that protagonist Rudolf Rassendyll has to travel away from an essentially modern England, to the fantasy land of Ruritania, to begin his adventure in the world of romance, passing over and away from a civilization that seems to bore him to one where real fun can happen. And once in Ruritania, the rightful king he meets is his own doubled self, which he must work to save. Aren't these doubled characters a significant symbol? They certainly form an important aspect of reality to poor Princess Flavia, who falls in love with Rudolf but must ultimately marry the doppelganger she doesn't love, for it is her "high duty" to unite the kingdom and the clans and keep the peace.

Princess Flavia is most wounded and unsettled by her experience, then, the true victim of wronged identity, and in the end, of the political system, a motif that puts her in curious familial relation to May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and all the other modernists to come.

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