Reading matters

There are several problems that arise when the end of the money comes sooner than the end of the month. One is that it inhibits me from using Kindle's 'one-click' tool in order to download new reading matter. As an alternative I considered purchasing booky-books but was quickly reminded that they are most often more costly than e-books.

Thus I found myself compelled to take a look at the volumes shelved and seldom re-visited at home. My library consists of little more than a running metre of books... more would have been a problem in the past when re-locating from one city to another. 

The book which sprang into my hand was something of a surprise, The Prisoner of Zenda, written in 1894 by Anthony Hope. Surprise, mainly because I have no recollection whatsoever of buying either this work of the sequel Rupert of Hentzau. Both are hardback editions published in England by Dent in 1962 and according to the impressum 'last reprinted 1967' and included illustrations by Michael Godfrey.

I had certainly seen as a schoolboy the 1952 film which starred Stewart Granger and James Mason... the romance, the gallantry, the pageantry and the slightly dubious uniforms!. (The photo at the top shows Ronald Colman in the earlier 1937 film.) My memories of the late sixties in London are in many respects hazy. One of my preoccupations at the time was a search for material which could be developed as a movie script with the leading role suited to Anita Pallenberg, who I had found fascinating in Volker Schlöndorff's Mord und Totschlag. And so I probably read Anthony Hope's book at around that time, with the idea that the impersonation central to the story could be given some very sixties gender-bending, with an androgynous female taking the place of the sequestered King... not the gallant Victorian gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll, but a girl travelling on a Eurail pass and who bore an uncanny resemblance to the beleaguered President (not monarch, of course) of Ruritania. I am sure I made some notes, maybe even essayed a synopsis, and filed it away with the awful title Zenda, baby!.

Anyway, it was a most enjoyable read and tonight I shall start the sequel. Interesting to note that the author himself alluded to "a well-founded suspicion that the mysterious prisoner of Zenda was not a man at all but (here I had much ado not to smile) a woman disguised as a man" as Hope wrote five pages before the end of his tale.

I, too, have much ado not to smile.