The Guardian review called this book “beautiful and disturbing and profound”, to which I can only quote the author herself in an interview with the same paper (though not directed at the reviewer or interviewer but about people in general taking it too seriously): “…look, we’re talking about Zorro, not Che Guevara. Calm down”.
I know, I know, it’s a big serious author and she wrote a story about a prototypical masked-man action hero so you big serious reviewers have got to find some kind of deep literary merit in it, but – profound? Really? Okay…
It’s an origin tale for Zorro, the masked man of Spanish colony California of the 1800s, against the backdrop of revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the fight for independence of several colonies, to say nothing of pirates and gypsies and secret societies and all that good stuff, not a stone of which is left unturned.
It opens in Alta California, with the tempestuous meeting of a dashing Spanish captain and an Indian war-chief who also happens to turn out to a beautiful girl; quite shortly, they’ve produced Diego de la Vega, destined to become everyone’s favourite swashbuckler, El Zorro (the fox).
He and his childhood friend Bernardo grow up in a world of injustice, having to watch the privileged elite drive the Indians off ancestoral land or enslave them to work on their farms. Eventually they go to Barcelona, where young Diego has all the experiences and training in sword-fighting that will form him into Zorro.
As the (unknown, but fairly obvious) chronicler, who directly chats to the reader at the opening of each part, says, “Every story must have a villain…Zorro was fortunate to have a rival like Rafael Moncada”. Moncada’s out to marry the beautiful Juliana, whom Diego also loves, and must protect, as Moncada’s plotting to have her becomes ever more desperate. Eventually, Diego returns to where he started (the charmingly self-aware narrator points out that it is the norm in epic narratives that the hero returns to where he began), in California, for the final confrontation and the final step in his transformation to his double-life as foppish landowner and heroic Zorro.
Allende handles the tale well; it’s sharply told, there’s plenty of action, lots of good characters, her research is solid (having only just read a non-fiction account of the Roma of Eastern Europe, I was impressed with the accuracy of the details about that society in there), and it’s an all-round enjoyable read.
For me, it suffered on two counts: one, what with being an origin tale, there’s not too much suspense there, really (we know he can’t get caught, killed, or unmasked this time round, because it’s his first time round), and two, there’s not a lot of dialogue, and the little that is there pretty much exists, quite clunkily at times, to drive the story forward – nothing wrong with that, but I like dialogue, especially witty repartee, and without it, I didn’t feel Diego’s “romantic heart and fun-loving nature” came across as much as it could have – though it does comes across, along with the somewhat reckless, feckless part of his nature.
Isabel Allende’s written lots more books, and her website is here. Naturally, Zorro has his own website too.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au
I don’t think that Allende writes dialogue well either, in fact she doesn’t use it in her narratives as a rule and interestingly Gabriela Garcia Marquez doesn’t either. Perhaps it’s the storytelling nature of the Latin culture that keeps the writing in the realm of the storyteller rather than the characters?
That’s an interesting observation: I think of minimal dialogue as a ‘literary’ style in general, bvut you’re quite right in noting that both Allende and Marquez share that focus.