The Prisoner of Windsor - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

“The difference between you and Robert,” said my sister-in-law, who often (bless her!) speaks on a platform, and oftener still as if she were on one, “is that he recognises the duties of his position, and you see the opportunities of yours.” “To a man of spirit, my dear Rose,” I answered, “opportunities are duties.” ~Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) And that very much is the spirit of the enterprise - as Mark updates and inverts Anthony Hope's swashbuckling romance for an even more fantastical make-believe kingdom: today's UK. In The Prisoner of Zenda an English gentleman on holiday has to stand in for a Ruritanian king at his coronation. In The Prisoner of Windsor, on the eve of another coronation, a dispossessed Ruritanian king has to stand in for an English gentleman at ...well, we'll leave that to Steyn's telling of his tale. Mark's contemporary inversion of Sir Anthony's caper arose by accident: He had just read a kind comment from a listener who'd belatedly discovered his audio serialization of The Prisoner of Zenda - and immediately afterwards he chanced to see a BBC news bulletin reporting on something or other in a Covid-lockdowned London, followed by a story on the Polish election. And it occurred to him, not for the first time, that in the age of contagion life in most Eastern European capitals looks more normal than life in most Western European capitals. It is one of the odder twists of fate that, having had the lousiest twentieth century one could imagine, the far side of the Iron Curtain seems to be navigating the currents of the twenty-first rather better than the west. And so, with Sir Anthony's Ruritania still floating around the back of his mind, he wondered if today a Ruritanian wouldn't find life in London at least as fantastical as Hope's Rudolf Rassendyll found life in Strelsau. And so herewith an entertainment: a sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda set in England at the dawn of a new reign - and not just a sequel, but an inversion. Anthony Hope's romance of 1894 spawned an entire industry of yarns set in barely credible kingdoms - and the contemporary United Kingdom fits into that tradition just fine. You don't need to have read Zenda to get the concept. As with Hope's tale, this inversion is about honor and duty in a very foreign land.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.