I recently read a novel by Robert A. Heinlein called Double Star. It is a reworking of Anthony Hope’s classic The Prisoner of Zenda with an alternate ending. Zenda ends unhappily (in some senses) while Double Star ends happily. It is this change that prompts these reflections.
In The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman visits the Central European kingdom of Ruritania, where his exact likeness to its King (a distant relative) enmeshes him in pretending to be the king, who has been kidnapped. In the course of the tale the Englishman woos the Princess Flavia and wins her heart; engages in sword battles with the evil Prince and would-be usurper of the throne; storms a castle and rescues the king. At tale’s end the Englishman, his deeds known only to a few co-conspirators, Flavia, and the King himself, leaves Ruritania to return to his ‘ordinary’ life in England. Behind him he leaves a throne he could well have commanded, and a beautiful Princess whose heart will be forever his, though duty has commanded her to remain and wed the King, and serve as Ruritania’s Queen.
In Double Star an American actor is hired to portray a prominent politician who has been kidnapped; in the course of this tale the actor is adopted into a clan of noble Martians; delivers speeches and runs a campaign for Prime Minister of the Solar System’s Empire; and finally must adopt the guise forever, when the politician suffers a heart attack and dies even as his party wins a majority in the Imperial Parliament. Oh yes, the actor also wins the heart of the politician’s Girl Friday, who had been wholly in love with the politician; he marries her and they have children, and the actor enjoys a long career of 25+ years as the politician.
So the two tales follow parallel paths, though in Ruritania swords are used more, and on New Batavia, the lunar seat of the Empire, it is rather speeches and words the hero employs. The paths however diverge drastically only at the end.
In Zenda the imposter succeeds in rescuing the King, and thereby ensures he must himself leave behind crown, kingdom, and Princess. This makes the ending bitter-sweet, although it confirms Rudolph Rassendyll as ‘the noblest Rasendyll of them all’ in his selfless act of giving up all that he has won. He must return to the humdrum life he left behind in London – a life that will, we are sure, be rendered all the more colorless by the fact that before he had not been in love, and now he is, forever – to Flavia who will be the wife of another, forever lost to Rudolph.
In Double Star the imposter succeeds in impersonating the politician and rewriting and delivering speeches so as to bring victory to his party. Smith is ready indeed to return to the acting life and leave the imposture behind him, only author Heinlein acts as the deus ex machina and bumps off the real politician by a heart attack or stroke, the result of drugs given him during his abduction. Thus Smith must take the brass ring, and enjoy power, fame, and the love of a good woman. (This can be seen as ironical on Heinlein’s part, for Smith never was interested in politics before, and in fact if he had any political leanings they were completely opposed to those of the Expansionist Party he will now head and whose reforms he will see enacted.)
Both of the stories deal almost explicitly with the notion that the tale is a sort of daydream or wish fulfillment on the part of the reader. The act of pretending to be the hero is doubled within the tale itself, whose hero must pretend to be a greater and more prestigious man – a man whose life comes with a very attractive love-interest built-in. We must, as readers, surrender the daydream when we finish the tale and close the book, but nothing stops the hero-imposter from continuing his dream job.
So it would seem that we’d enjoy the tale best if the protagonist wins everything he wishes. The Heinlein solution looks better than the Hope solution.
But, is it so?
There is some sort of pleasure in the misery of the Hope solution. Maybe it lies in Aristotle’s notion of the purging of emotions we experience when following a well-designed tragedy. Or maybe it lies in the feelings of greater nobility we get when we identify with the self-sacrificing Rudolph. Or maybe it has something to do with the glow of feeling that we have ourselves been bettered, even ennobled, by the reading of a light tale of adventurous derring-do.
Whatever the cause, for yours truly at least, the ending of Zenda seems much to be preferred to that of Double Star.
(Composed 10 May 2010 by keyboard)
