opular novelist and screenwriter William Goldman fondly
remembers how his lifelong love of adventure fiction was kindled by S.
Morgenstern's The Princess Bride, an adventure novel his immigrant father
read to him when he was a child. But when he gives the same book to his own
son, he discovers that his father read only the good parts of a book that
was otherwise unreadably boring. Goldman decides to put together an edited
version for today's readers.
Set in a mythical country called Florin, the novel tells of the
beautiful but unwashed Buttercup, whose hobbies include rebuffing local
swains and tormenting the Farm Boy. She starts bathing when she realizes she
loves the Farm Boy, whose real name is Westley. He loves her too, and leaves
to seek his fortune, only to be lost at sea, an apparent victim of the Dread
Pirate Roberts. Buttercup swears she will never love again. This is not
changed by a forced bethrothal to the powerful Prince Humperdinck.
Before the marriage can take place, she is kidnapped by a gang composed
of the Sicilian Vizzini, the Spaniard Inigo and the Turk Fezzik. They have
been hired to take her to the enemy country Guilder. Crossing the sea, they
find themselves tracked by an implacable Man In Black. A flashback reveals
Inigo to be the greatest swordsman in the world, who has devoted his life to
tracking down the six-fingered nobleman who murdered his father. Inigo is so
confident of his gifts that, left behind to dispatch the Man In Black, he
duels with his left hand. But the Man In Black turns out to be even greater
at swordsmanship and defeats him. Another flashback reveals Fezzik to be the
strongest man in the world, but the Man In Black handily outfights him
anyway.
Finally defeating the brilliant Vizzini in a battle of wits, the Man in
Black seizes Buttercup and reveals himself as Westley, who through an odd
sequence of events has taken over the role of the Dread Pirate Roberts
himself. The lovers flee into the horrific Fire Swamp, surviving its many
dangers only to find Humperdinck and his men waiting on the other side.
Buttercup vows to marry Humperdinck if Westley is allowed to go free.
Humperdinck gives his promise, but orders his confidante, the six-fingered
nobleman Count Rugen, to torture Westley to death anyway. Rugen agrees.
Buttercup returns to the castle thinking Westley is safe.
By the time Buttercup realizes she cannot live without Westley, Rugen is
already torturing him with a Device that can suck away the years of a man's
life. We also learn that Humperdinck arranged Buttercup's kidnapping,
intending to use her assassination as an excuse to wage war against Guilder.
She will now have to die on their wedding night.
Elsewhere, a reunited Fezzik and Inigo learn the identity of the
six-fingered man and the whereabouts of Westley, the one man who had ever
defeated either of them. They decide to rescue him to seek his help, and
fight their way through Humperdinck's horrific Zoo of Death only to discover
Westley has been tortured to death. Reviving Westley, rescuing Buttercup and
providing Inigo his revenge is going to take a miracle...
The Good Parts of a Good Book
Although best known today for the movie version with Mandy Patinkin and
Christopher Guest, The Princess Bride is fashioned as a book best
encountered when read aloud. William Goldman reminds us regularly that a
father read this story to his son, and that the son's life was changed by
it; he introduces it as a narrative that enthralled him as a child, and
promises that it's going to blow the reader away. It's normally not a good
idea for any author to preface a story by saying how terrific it is, but
Goldman keeps his promise, buttressing it with regular summaries of all the
boring stuff he left out.
It's certainly a silly story, filled with campy moments that seem
determined to prevent any reader from taking anything that happens here with
undue seriousness. It works as well as it does because the emotional heart
of the adventure is there anyway. Westley and Buttercup go overboard with
the true love routine, but there's never any doubt that they mean it, or
that they deserve to be together. Inigo may bring the art of obsession to
entirely new levels, but there's never any doubt that his heart was broken
by his father's murder or that he deserves to have his vengeance. Fezzik may
be quite a few bricks short of a load, and a hired goon to boot, but there's
never any doubt that he's at heart a sweet guy, who deserves to do something
right for once. We care about these people, and we get caught up in their
adventures. We even share the young Billy Goldman's dismay when his father
interrupts the story to tell him, at one point, that not all the right
people die. By the time Inigo has his final encounter with Count Rugen, and
Westley has his final encounter with Prince Humperdinck, the spoof aspect is
forgotten. We're involved.
Goldman has one stylistic trick which serves him well in many of his
novels, and which is put to especially good use here: he is an absolute
master of the run-on-sentence used to depict an action scene. The most
famous action sequence in The Princess Bride, the swordfight between Inigo
and the Man in Black, is filled with such sentences, some of which go on at
dizzying length to capture a scene filled with stunning reversals and
breathtaking martial artistry. But the book contains an even better
sequence, sadly unfamiliar to audiences who only know the story from the Rob
Reiner film. In this chapter, Fezzik and Inigo storm the Zoo of Death, a
dungeon filled with booby traps, to save Westley from Count Rugen. Fezzik
fights a giant snake with his bare hands, and Inigo fights a swarm of rabid
bats with his sword. Both sequences, conveyed in long breathless run-on
sentences, are inherently ludicrous, but they're also both intensely
exciting--the kind of sequences readers reread months and years later just
to recapture the magic again. Goldman tells us that these sections,
supposedly written by S. Morgenstern, blew him away when he was a kid. Since
he wrote them himself, he can be accused of bragging. Let him. He's earned
the right.
The cult success of the novel, buoyed by the popularity of the movie,
has led to the release of a 25th-anniversary edition, which includes Goldman's reminiscences of the film and a long section from an attempted sequel
called Buttercup's Baby. Goldman informs us in this afterword that the main
reason he never "edited" the sequel was the estate's decision to have
Stephen King do it instead. He even casts King as a villain of sorts, eager
to take over Goldman's work while dissing Goldman's "edit" of the first
book. It's an amusing grace note. But since that's all that it is, and since
the excerpt from Buttercup's Baby reads like the false start it probably
was, it is not necessary to get this edition in order to enjoy the original
novel as the treasure it is.
