The Princess Bride

Just over a year ago, I watched the movie adaptation of this book. I liked it just fine, but didn't necessarily find it to be super-memorable or worthy of its cult status. Recently, I decided to give the book - one of the oldest items in my backlog, a Christmas present more than twelve years old - a fair shake. Consider me impressed.

The book is written as a story within a story. The outer shell of the story is that a fictionalized version of the author, William Goldman, has decided to create an abridgment of his favorite childhood story: The Princess Bride, a romantic adventure satire by Simon Morgenstern. Goldman's father had read him the book when he was a boy, but unbeknownst to Goldman, his father was skipping a whole lot of boring minutiae all along. As it turns out, and as Goldman wouldn't discover until attempting to abridge the story in adulthood, the original book was a lengthy political satire full of horribly dated jabs and critiques of Renaissance-era Europe, and the story that Goldman's father had read to him as a boy was really just a plotting construct to hold everything together. So Goldman decides to heavily truncate the text into a "Good Parts" version that reads a lot more like the story he loved while growing up. It's a smart and clever way to frame the actual Princess Bride story itself, as Goldman can now just interrupt the narrative and paraphrase long and boring gaps in the action, allowing we the readers to enjoy an optimal ratio of actual eventful scenes to page count. Another benefit to this style is that the whole book, which only spans barely more than 300 pages, takes on a much more epic and classic feel given all the times Goldman interjects something like, "here I'm cutting 80 pages of wedding preparations, a section written with the intent to ridicule the Scandinavian customs of the time."

Now, the inner story - the main one, of course - is also entirely a fabrication of William Goldman; there is no Simon Morgenstern and prior to 1973 there was no classic tale known as The Princess Bride. And it's a well-written one. There's a fairly deep level of characterization going on here, with an appropriate amount of time spent on backstories for the five or six main characters. Goldman also does a fantastic job instilling suspense, action, and romance into the mix. The whole thing is written with a playfully light tone - nothing like A Song of Ice and Fire or anything - but it's a very effective story all the same. Actually, looking back, I'm curious as to how I avoided reading this book for so long in the first place. I got it some time in '99 or 2000 or so, back around the same time I was reading and enjoying both fantasy adventures (like The Hobbit) and humorous irony-laced satires (like Catch-22). Why didn't I jump on a book like this, a combination of both those genres? I can't say. But, either way, I'm happy I've read the book now. Not only was it a real treat, but I've also knocked one of the oldest titles off of my backlog. All progress is progress, but progress on the top end of these lists just feels a bit more rewarding than progress at the bottom.