The Prisoner of Windsor

A remote fantastical kingdom far from Europe's chancelleries of power...

An unpopular monarch on the eve of his coronation...

A ruling class of plotters and would-be usurpers...

...and a gentleman adventurer on holiday.

No, not Ruritania in the nineteenth century, but the United Kingdom in the twenty-first. Mark Steyn's new book is both a sequel to and an inversion of Anthony Hope's classic of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda. In the original, an English gentleman on vacation is called upon to stand in for his lookalike, the King of Ruritania, at his coronation. Over a century later, a dispossessed Ruritanian king on vacation in London is called upon to return the favour and stand in for an Englishman in an absurd fantastical kingdom where Brexit never quite happened...

Mark Steyn'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.