ZORRO: A NOVEL
Isabel Allende
(4th Estate; £16.99)
In his short story The Jungle Rot Kid On The Nod, Philip Jose Farmer posited a parallel universe in which the Burroughs chronicling the adventures of Tarzan was William S rather than Edgar Rice. This current incongruous juxtaposition of author and title renders an equivalent double-take not so much inevitable as irresistible: it sounds like the first move in a new parlour game, in which contestants match distinguished literary novelists to pulp pop-culch icons. What price John Fowles’s Man From U.N.C.L.E.? Paul Auster’s The Shadow? Norman Mailer’s Doc Savage? Thomas Pynchon’s Terminator?
The original Zorro (‘the fox’) was created for All-Story magazine in 1919 by pulpmeister Johnston McCulley as a Mexicali variant on the Grand Archetype of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel: the indolent aristo whose languidly fatuous façade conceals the dashing daredevil man of action (imagine Bertie Wooster as James Bond’s secret identity) with Bruce ‘Batman’ Wayne being Zorro’s most obvious comic-book descendent. The vital difference between the Pimpernel and Zorro is that Sir Percy Blakeney’s alter ego primarily dedicated himself to rescuing his fellow aristos from receiving what many might consider to be their just deserts during the French Revolution, whereas Diego Vega (his name expanded to the ‘de la Vega’ Allende uses here by the scriptwriters of the 1950s Disney TV series) was an enthusiastic class traitor defending the poor and downtrodden against tyrannical overlords.
Allende leaves few swashes unbuckled as she follows her protagonist from the late 18th to the early 19th century, exploring the history of California (hey, it’s just another LA story, after all) along the way. She never condescends to the material and, as a grandmaster of magic realism, she is able to give Diego’s saga of the hero and how he came to be a smooth, limpid flow which transcends the innate preposterousness of his acquisition of such a dizzying armoury of skills. The son of a Spanish grandee and a Shoshone woman warrior (herself half-Spanish), Diego learns from both his Indian family and from the cream of Europe in order to become the swordsman, horseman, acrobat, tracker, actor, cardsharp and illusionist he needs to be in order to create the perona of Zorro, reclaim his father’s stolen estates, pursue the woman he loves and become a masked champion of justice. Tantalisingly, she ends her story more or less at the point where conventional Zorro narratives begin, but then a superhero’s origin is often more interesting than his frequently repetitive subsequent adventures.
Literary novelists traditionally treat the artefacts of popular culture as objets trouves rather than artistic creations in their own right. One aspect of the final product which vaguely niggles this reader, at least, is the absence of even token acknowledgement that Allende has retooled and reinterpreted an already-existing mythos built up by divers hands over a period of decades or, indeed, that any imagination other than her own was ever involved. Meanwhile, this may be an anomaly both in the Zorro saga and the Allende oeuvre, but it is a highly entertaining one. As high culture/low-culch throwdowns go, it beats Ang Lee’s Hulk.
Independent, 2005
