I've been meaning to get around to reading The Princess Bride for absolutely ages. I'd heard about the great swathes of personal-narrative text in this book, and that put me off for a while, but at last, after years of loving the movie, I finally bought it. I really don't know why the idea of great swathes of personal-narrative text was so abhorrent; it's never much of a problem for me unless it's really badly written. After reading it, I can safely say that it didn't take away too much from the story at all, and I'm so glad that I have read this book at last.
In the country of Florin, milkmaid Buttercup is slowly making her way through the ranks of beauty, eventually arriving in the top twenty most beautiful women in the world by her late teens. But her pretty exterior doesn't say all for her, because she's horribly rude to the boy who works on their farm. His real name is Westley, but she always calls him Farm Boy, and never speaks to him except to order him around. Every time she gives him a task, he answers the same way: "As you wish." Buttercup's parents are not in what most people would call a happy marriage, and their daughter has so little imagination that her beloved stallion is named simply Horse. But one day, following a visit from a Count and Countess, Buttercup begins to realize that she is in love with Westley. She dashes to his hovel and tells him of her thirty-minutes-old passion, and eventually he tells her that he loves her back. But their happiness is shattered when Westley decides to go seek his fortune in America. It's not long before the dreadful news arrives--pirates have attacked, and Westley is missing, almost certainly dead. Buttercup falls into a blank state and vows to never love again. Meanwhile, Prince Humperdinck has just received news that King Lotharon is dying, causing his son to be very put out, because now the hunting-obsessed Humperdinck shall have to find himself a bride. After a few failed suits, including a bald princess of Guilder--the enemy country--who conceals her shame under a massive hat collection, the milkmaid from the country, gorgeous and grieving, is swept up onto the Prince's horse and taken away to begin her new life at the castle in Florin City. They have established that there is to be no love in their relationship, but there's worse than that, unbeknownst to Princess Buttercup. The hidden plots begin to be revealed when a strange trio kidnaps the young woman on one of her daily rides. They are Vizzini the evil genius, hired to commit crimes; Fezzik the giant, who really hates to hurt people; and Inigo Montoya the great fencing wizard who wants nothing more than justice for the murder of his father, which he witnessed when he was a young boy. But as they near the Cliffs of Insanity, Inigo notices a ship following them--the man in black has come to claim his prize...
It's a bit hard for me to write a decent book review when I know the movie so well, and it doesn't help that there's so much to praise here.
The Princess Bride is so, so beautifully satirical, and Goldman creates layers. He talks about how when he was a little boy sick with pneumonia, his "Florinese" father read him The Princess Bride by a fellow Florinese man named S. Morgenstern. Goldman says that hearing that story changed his life, and he wanted his son, Jacob, to have it for his tenth birthday. But when he went to get a copy of the book, he found that his father had only read him the "good parts," basically abridging it as he went along by skipping parts he thought his sports-obsessed, pneumonia-fevered son would not like. This inspired the adult Goldman to write an abridgment based on what his father had read him all those years ago. He talks about hearing the story and about Florin so believably that you almost forget what a tale it is--and I didn't mind that. He writes things like, "The Florinese scholars would argue that Morgenstern put this in here to satirize the royal family of Florin, which he hated, but I didn't feel like it had a place here," and all the while large parts of the story are satires for different reasons. He may have "left out" all the subtle lampooning of Florin's ruling family, but there're plenty of digs at relationships, such as Buttercup's change in minutes from disparaging Westley to wildly loving him, among other subjects.
But The Princess Bride is not just a huge joke about a story that didn't exactly exist like the author claims it did and about people doing weird and stupid things. It's clear that Goldman loved two characters best: Fezzik and Inigo. He says that Fezzik's his favorite, but I think that Inigo comes a close second. They have such backstories, invented with imagination and fleshed out with care and love. But I think that the most interesting moment in the creation of these two characters comes in Buttercup's Baby. This is a second Morgenstern story, Goldman explains, that he was allowed to abridge the first chapter of. It tells the story of what happened after the happy couple and their two best friends arrived at One Tree Island, and that's all I will say for now. But there is a section of Buttercup's Baby called simply "Inigo," and it's a little piece of the great Spanish fencer's life when he's about twenty years old. It includes mind training...and the unexpected: a young lady named Guilietta. The last thing one associates Inigo with is romance, but in what Goldman refers to as the Unexplained Inigo Fragment, our famous utterer of "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. Prepare to die" is most certainly--if rather briefly--enthralled by a young countess. Goldman includes a note after the Unexplained Inigo Fragment, in which he says, "...Morgenstern shows us the human side of Inigo so we know he's more than just this Spanish Revenge Machine. (Frankly, I wish I had known this part existed before I read The Princess Bride.)" (p. 411). As he has demonstrated the whole way along, he can master the Morgenstern thread perfectly without slipping, but what he wants to say is so beautifully plain to me--he means that here, he has made Inigo more human, instead of the "Spanish Revenge Machine" that he was in The Princess Bride--because honestly, Inigo's whole purpose in that book is to kill the man who slaughtered his father. But Goldman must've realized how much more potential Ingio had. I love the Unexplained Inigo Fragment. It makes so much sense, even as unexplained as it is, and it does so much for the person who is possibly my absolute favorite Princess Bride character. And as for Fezzik, his history is perfected in The Princess Bride--an author's favorite character is always the one with the best story and the best everything, really, much as we may try to get away from it sometimes.
What's bad about The Princess Bride? Nothing, really. I would only wish that some movie scenes could've been in the book (but writing a screenplay for your own book is also a great time to add in things that you went, "Aw, should've written that in" about when you published it), and that some of the book scenes could've made it into the movie. Sometimes the side notes and introductions irritated me, but most of the time, they just made it a slightly different book--and not in a bad way. The Princess Bride is one of those books that's just so inexplicably great, and you can't praise precise things, but you're unable to find anything to really criticize. It's not every day that one of those books comes your way, so...
In short, I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn't mind the asides too much, and who loves a good story. It helps if you're a good and insightful reader who can see all of the layers, but even if you aren't, it won't take away from your enjoyment one bit. The Princess Bride is an icon in the world of stories. Maybe one day it will reach the level of Dickens, but I only hope that it doesn't end up being the stunning story that is too antiquated or over-taught that few people notice its qualities who are able to be changed by them, as Dickens unfortunately is. (I will probably write an entry someday about Dickens--some reviews on his books, of course, but also on how sad it is that the majority of the the young and brilliant won't pick up anything besides Oliver Twist--if that--as I have. But this is off-topic. Read The Princess Bride!)