The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I thought I'd reviewed this one at some point; you'd think I would have, by now. But I read the novel when the SFBC did it in 1995 - I might even have bought it for the club then; I can't remember - and the copy I have is of that edition, with a cover by Ruth Sanderson that now makes me feel bad. (The SFBC sometimes got good covers, but we regularly had tight schedules and we generally paid on the low end of acceptable, which combined meant that we could get artists who do good work - like Sanderson - but often couldn't give them the time and space to deliver that good work for us. But then, life is pain, isn't it?)

So this book has sat on my shelf for thirty years since the last time I read it. I've seen the movie several times in that stretch - I think once even in a theater, for some anniversary or other - and author William Goldman has died since then. For whatever reason, I picked it back up.

The Princess Bride, the novel, is subtly different from the movie Rob Reiner made from it - the movie is a somewhat simpler, less gnarly thing, with screenwriter Goldman taking out all of the bits author Goldman put in about his fictionally unhappy life. The book has a lot of digs about Goldman's fictional wife, Helen the psychologist (not Ilene the model) and about his fictional son Jason (not his actual daughters Jenny and Susannah). The frame story is more complex in the novel - it's not just a grandfather reading to his grandson, but a fictionalized Goldman deliberately trying to recreate the "good parts" version of the (fictional) S. Morgenstern original that his father read to him while he was young and sick, after discovering the "real" book is full of long, tedious details when he tried to get his son (the aforementioned fictional Jason) to read it. All of the editorial commentary came out for the movie and most of the metafiction - a little metafiction goes a long way in a visual medium.

The core story is exactly the same: if you've seen the movie (and who hasn't, at this point?), you know all of the beats of the story and all of the good dialogue. Goldman wrote a lot of strong, memorable lines into Princess Bride, and he recognized that when he turned it into a screenplay - he even repositioned my favorite line (the aforementioned "life is pain" bit), which was in the Inigo flashback in the novel.

That's my favorite line partially because it's more important in the book. The movie gestures towards the idea that stories don't necessarily have happy endings, and that life is unfair, but the book has those themes embedded deeply and consistently. The last lines of the novel make that clear:

I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

Otherwise? Princess Bride the novel is deeper and wider than the movie, as novels - even fairly short ones, like this - have more space and more words to do that. As Goldman's fictional barber father puts it in the book, this story has "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

If you've only seen the movie, you're definitely missing things - whether you'll be happy with the additions, I can't say. (But, again, life is pain: expect it.) It's a smart modern fantasy novel that's more complex than it looks, that balances sweetness and cynicism brilliantly, and an interesting object lesson in how a very good novel can become a very good movie, and what had to change to make that happen.