The Princess Bride

I love books about old books. I’m thinking about novels such as Michael Ende’s ‘Neverending Story’, Jonathan Carroll’s ‘The Land of Laughs’ and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s ‘Shadow of the Wind’. Usually involving the protagonist describing some hidden-away bookshop and a particular fantastic, extravagantly obscure book that once fell into their hands and changed their lives forever. There’s Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller…’ too – another favourite in which metafiction’s fun and not bloody boring.

It’s a way for these writers to describe their love affair with reading, but also to write about the act of writing in a way that doesn’t get dry or clever-clever (mostly). I’ve just read William Goldman’s ‘The Princess Bride’ – twenty years after I first saw the film and loved it, back in my first year at University in Lancaster. I just picked up the book – I don’t know what made me – and for once I was glad I’d waited the twenty years. There was another layer of narrative that the book had accreted for its silver anniversary eleven years ago.

In its dotage the novel is wearing a lovely cardigan of extra stuff – we catch up with events after the fluffed ending of the original fairy-tale-within-the-tale and also, with the life of the implied autobiographical William Goldman of the italicized sections of the original book. In the original he’d come in and comment on the bits he’d edited from the original ‘Princess Bride’ manuscript by Morgenstern. All made up, of course: all delicious layers of made-up nonsense, like a big sticky vanilla slice with cream and icing sugar. I love that flickering between the derring-do and romance of the inner tale and the wisecracking New Yorkese of Goldman’s fictional Goldman. It’s witty and zippy and a hell of a device for cracking on through the boring or unnecessary bits of an adventure.

The best thing about the book is its humour. It got me thinking about how most fantasy fiction – most fiction full stop – is pretty humourless. There’s very few laughs in even the booky-book-type books I listed above. (Maybe just wry laughs. Ho-ho.) Goldman is full of humour. Belly-laughs and daft jokes, yes – but also humour in the good-humoured sense. Laughing at how people are, just as themselves. There’s such a warmth in the book. Even when it’s dealing with two-dimensional characters and scenes of battle and meta-discursive asides and footnotes and seemingly irrelevant anecdotes to do with Hollywood.

It all slots together so nicely – like one of those pieces of furniture fancy carpenters make without nails or glue.