The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I wasn't impressed by the Princess Bride when I first saw clips of it. It looked like a cheap and corny fantasy film, on a par with something like Hawk the Slayer. I was much too sophisticated for family friendly schmaltz like that - I wanted proper fantasy, like Conan the Destroyer! Needless to say, past me was an idiot. 

I think I finally got around to watching it on VHS a few years after its release and it slowly dawned on me that there was a lot more going on here than met the eye. Sure, it was at heart a cheesy fairy tale story of a beautiful girl, a handsome farm boy, a villainous prince and a black hearted nobleman, with pirates, dashing swordsmen, mighty giants and criminal geniuses thrown in. However, it is also very funny, completely aware of its own cheesiness and with an extra layer of meta text added where it turns out the story is being narrated by a grandfather to his poorly grandson, picking out the 'good parts' from a weighty original story with a further twist at the end too.

The original novel by William Goldman, and this 25th anniversary expanded edition in particular, take the meta narrative a step further, with the author explaining how he discovered the original work by 'S Morgenstern' that had been read to him by his father and the realisation that the bed time story had skipped all of the dull bits with kissing and boring stuff. He describes his process of producing the 'good parts' abridged version with interjections in the text to explain what he has left out and why. Why also hear of his many travails in writing the book, the screenplay for the movie, the details of Hollywood life (lawyers! actors! dames!) and his own efforts to share the story with his own son.

Goldman gleefully mixes fictional anecdotes into the story with just enough veritas to make you think that maybe there really were countries called Florin and Guilder with Cliffs of Insanity and Fire Swamps that could be visited today. There's a lovely section where Goldman considers adding an additional scene to the book to cover a crucial chapter left out by Morgenstern, but is forced to remove it by his publisher and then says that any interested reader could write in and request a copy of the missing piece. There was an actual address that you could write to, and in return you would receive instead a letter concerning Goldman's legal wrangles with the Morgenstern estate and their rapacious lawyer Kermit Shog.

The actual story part of the book is hugely entertaining and very funny in places, with many quotable lines and memorable scenes. I particularly enjoyed the famous clifftop duel between master swordsman Inigo Montoya and the mysterious masked Dread Pirate Roberts which happily name checks various Renaissance sword maestros and was one of the reasons that I took up historical swordsmanship so that I could truthfully say that I had studied my Agrippa.

A delicious coda regarding the abridgement of the sequel Buttercup's Baby concludes the book with a line that had me literally crying with laughter on reading it. This is a book that I can heartily recommend, particularly if you have only ever seen the film.