The Princess Bride
William Goldman
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Should I even bother summarizing this?
I still will, of course, because I do it in all my reviews and on this blog we mostly believe in consistency, but it seems redundant when The Princess Bride is so ubiquitous in nerdy booky memes. On the other hand, everyone might not necessarily recognize “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya” on first glance. We continue.
Though mostly set in the fictional European country of Florin, the story begins not in Florin itself but in the present-day United States, where a fictionalized version of Goldman (yes, the actual author) is trying his damndest to introduce his young son Jason to The Princess Bride, a classic satirical novel by Florinese author S. Morgenstern. The problem is that Morgenstern’s cut is over 9,000 pages long, and Jason has no interest in multi-hundred-page descriptions of medieval Florinese history, customs, or horticulture. (I mean, jeez, dude, that is kind of a steep ask.) Despite having never read the book from cover to cover himself – his Florinese father cornered him one day and started reading the book to him when he was sick and immobilized in bed – Goldman sets out to abridge Morgenstern’s work, creating a Frankensteined version stitched together from only the “good parts,” i.e., the parts that people (or just his son) might actually want to read. In doing so, he realizes his own father skipped or glossed over about 90% of the text during their reading sessions, and that there’s a lot more to Morgenstern than originally met his eye.
Depending on which edition you’re reading, it can take up to three introductions and maybe about 500 years before Goldman finally gets to the point, which is the blossoming romance between Buttercup, a rough-edged but aesthetically promising farmer’s daughter, and Westley, her father’s farm hand (addressed by Buttercup as “farm boy”). He almost never speaks, except to say “As you wish” whenever Buttercup issues her orders, but they still manage to fall passionately in love for no particular reason. After they’ve affirmed their love for each other, Westley leaves to seek his fortune in the States while Buttercup, terrified that he will run off with some American floozy before he can send for her, puts some serious work into her personal appearance and becomes the most beautiful woman in 100 years. Her efforts never reach their target audience: word comes that Westley’s ship was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who is infamous for leaving no survivors, which naturally seems to imply that Buttercup is now basically a widow.
Meanwhile, Florinese Crown Prince Humperdinck – barrel-shaped but extremely lethal – finds himself in want of a wife. All of his energy heretofore has gone into hunting, to the point that he has obsessively crafted a Zoo of Death to allow him to hunt the world’s deadliest creatures from the comfort of his own palace, but now his father is demented and probably dying, and Humperdinck is expected to produce heirs ASAP in order to cement his future succession. When a promising courtship with the Princess Noreena of the neighboring country of Guilder ends with the two countries on the brink of war, Humperdinck turns his attention to more local options and settles upon Buttercup, who has no royal experience whatsoever but is very beautiful. Buttercup initially chooses death, but accepts Humperdinck’s suit when he promises that their marriage need not involve any actual love. The smallfolk welcome the royal engagement with open arms, and Buttercup quickly becomes beloved. This is extremely convenient for Humperdinck, who wastes no time in arranging her murder.
In the original plan, Buttercup was to be kidnapped by a trio of small-time crooks: Vizzini, a Sicilian hunchback whose favorite word is “Inconceivable!”; Fezzik, a giant Turkish wrestler; and Inigo Montoya, a Spaniard who is currently one of the best fencers in history. Vizzini is in it for the money, Fezzik needs firm direction and so follows Vizzini, and Inigo has spent his life pursuing Count Rugen, his father’s murderer, thus far without success. The three were supposed to murder her and leave her on the border of Guilder while also planting physical evidence framing Guilder for her abduction and death. The kidnapping-and-planting part goes off without a hitch, but they soon realize they are being followed by a man dressed all in black, who defeats them one by one atop the Cliffs of Insanity before revealing himself as Westley (but not until after Buttercup angrily pushes him off a cliff, believing he is the pirate who is rumored to have killed Westley). With their misunderstandings out of the way and the air cleared, the two lovebirds try to escape through the fire swamp between Florin and Guilder, but they are caught by Humperdinck’s staged rescue party. Westley is given to Count Rugen, who tortures him in the Zoo of Death in the name of science, while the loving Humperdinck takes Buttercup back to the palace and proceeds to drive his security detail mad with insane and completely unsubstantiated predictions that Buttercup will be murdered by assassins sent from Guilder.
Back on the Cliffs of Insanity, Inigo and Fezzik wake up after their respective battles with Westley and independently learn that Vizzini is dead, and also independently realize they are nothing without Vizzini telling them what to do. After a spell of discontentment, they run into each other again by chance and team up to find Westley, whom they wish to adopt as a new leader: Fezzik as usual needs somebody giving him orders, and Inigo needs Westley to mastermind his renewed vendetta against Count Rugen. They arrive just slightly too late, as Westley has already been killed by a life-sucking machine, but they manage to get him to the disgraced Miracle Max, who begrudgingly gives them a chocolate-coated miracle pill that will allow Westley to function sort of normally for forty minutes. (The rest of his life force will take its sweet time coming back.) Unfortunately, Max is verging on senile, and he mistakenly tells them the pill will last an hour, which then informs the development of their plan. Nevertheless, Inigo manages to kill Count Rugen while Westley confronts Humperdinck and distracts him long enough for the three men to rescue Buttercup and ride off into the sunset on Humperdinck’s favorite horses. This isn’t actually the end of our heroes: though Humperdinck will of course hunt them relentlessly, the four are expecting to sail away on Westley’s pirate ship. Given the existence of Buttercup’s Baby, an epilogue of sorts, it is reasonable to assume that the ship was there and that they made it.
Now: I first read this in high school, and frankly I remember very clearly having the exact same problems with it then that I do now. Or maybe just the one exact same problem, because this would have been so much better without Goldman’s invented family dramas. Back in high school I didn’t give a shit about his son Jason or his brilliant but “cold” (his word) shrink of a wife who actually kinda sucks at what she does, and I still don’t. (If she’s cold and humorless, why did he marry her? Surely her lack of humor was fairly obvious during their courtship?) I particularly do not appreciate Goldman’s observation that the overweight Jason could be hot shit as a sumo wrestler if we just painted him yellow, and that one line would’ve made the book a DNF if I hadn’t already known it gets exponentially better when Goldman finally shuts up. I know, I know, written in the ’70s, blah blah blah. It’s still not funny. I appreciate the theory of Goldman’s narrative device – that is, I get wanting to only write the fun parts of the book, and I will say that the actual story really does read like Goldman was having the time of his life. If the annotations had solely concerned the hundreds of pages of history and culture that ended up on the cutting room floor, it would’ve been fine; but, since Goldman also saw fit to blather at length about this whole history he’d made up for himself, the device got tiresome fast.
Part of the problem is that Libby only had the 30th anniversary edition of the book, which means I had to slog through three introductions – the 30th anniversary introduction, the 25th anniversary introduction, and the original introduction, all of which for some reason seemed terribly important – before I got anywhere near the main story, which gave me about fifty pages to get thoroughly fed up with Goldman’s self-important behind-the-scenes bullshit. I would say his personal saga, resentful research, and general relationship with Morgenstern’s work take up about half of the book, and we come out the other end knowing as much about the fictitious Goldman as we do about Buttercup, Westley, and all the rest. His narration became particularly tortuous during Buttercup’s Baby, a 100-page “sample” of an unreleased sequel, which Goldman says he was planning to abridge until Morgenstern’s estate went behind his back and engaged Stephen King as the official abridger. After a tense conference, King and Goldman agreed that Goldman would abridge the first chapter and release it into the wild to see how it took, and the fact that I am telling you any of this is proof enough that Goldman talks way too much. As for that first chapter, it lacks the unbridled humor of The Princess Bride, and all in all I don’t feel the need to rehash it because I don’t really get it.
In a way Goldman’s ineptitude as a fourth-wall-breaking narrator is actually shocking, because The Princess Bride is wonderfully sardonic, hilarious, mischievous, everything Goldman was trying to achieve with his annotations. I really struggled with the rating for precisely this reason: ordinarily I would have given the book (or, if I’m honest, Goldman) a solid two stars, but the actual story is so good that I ended up giving it three. When it’s good, it’s good. The prose and the storytelling are immaculate, the characters mostly lovable, even Yellin, the poor bastard who is in charge of Humperdinck’s security and isn’t actually a good guy but still got me to feel sorry for him, in the end. Westley and Buttercup are vapid and uninteresting, but they’re supposed to be. They have one job, and they do it well. On the other hand, they are balanced by Fezzik and Inigo, who are – objectively – a pair of absolute cupcakes. I love the friendship between these two, and I love that they support each other in ways that wouldn’t occur to so-called “normal” people. It would have been so easy to make Fezzik the village idiot, and, though he is technically billed as one, I really appreciate that he isn’t actually stupid. In some ways he is smarter than his companions, though he suffers from such a case of impostor syndrome that he always believes he is in the wrong. I would have liked to have seen him gain at least some confidence in his own intelligence, but I suppose it’s not that kind of book.
In summary, The Princess Bride – the novel within the novel – is chef’s kiss perfection in its humor, writing, and sarcastic wit. If all I had gotten was 200 pages of the “good parts,” the book would’ve been a full five stars. Personally, I don’t even need Goldman’s abridgement-related annotations, because the story is cohesive enough that it wouldn’t have been the worst thing to throw the good parts into the publishing press and call it a day; however, if Goldman absolutely had to stick his oar in, which he apparently did, it would have been better to cut out the parts about his fake family and use the annotations strictly to discuss the changes from Morgenstern’s original work. Unfortunately, Goldman seems to have had an all-consuming love for the sound of his own voice, and for me it came thisclose to ruining the entire experience. I do still recommend the good parts, exactly as they are. But I will be skipping over the introductions and probably the bulk of the annotations in future rereads, and, though this will be far better for my personal sanity, it still seems like such a waste.
