Isabel Allende’s interesting career has been marked by three distinct types of fiction: what used to be called magical realism as in “The House of the Spirits” (1985), in which she was roughly to Gabriel Garcia Marquez what Carson McCullers was to William Faulkner; historical fiction, represented by the companion novels “Daughter of Fortune” (1999) and “Portrait in Sepia” (2001); and smart kid’s lit, like last year’s “Kingdom of The Golden Dragon.” All three paths converge in her new novel, “Zorro,” one of those rare and perfect matches of subject and author.
The character of “Zorro” – “fox” in Spanish – originated not in Mexico or Spain but in the mind of a New York journalist and pulp writer named Johnston McCulley. McCulley moved to Southern California in 1908 and picked up something of the color and lore of the provincial times, though nothing at all of its history.
No one is sure exactly who the inspirations were for Zorro, though the Baroness Emmuska Orezy’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” the masked Englishman who battled French revolutionary fanatics, was a likely candidate. But the Scarlet Pimpernel fought for the aristocracy while Zorro fought against the aristocracy for the common man; he was an outlaw and almost certainly was modeled, at least in part, on the legendary California bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose head was said to be preserved in a jar for more than half a century until it vanished in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. (The screenplay to the 1998 film “The Mask of Zorro” ingeniously turns Zorro into the avenging brother of Joaquin Murieta.)
The Zorro we have come to know and love wasn’t a product so much of birth as evolution. McCulley’s first Zorro, written for a pulp adventure magazine, was simply a Spanish gentleman in a mask fighting for the rights of the downtrodden Mexican peasants and Indians. In 1920, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. changed all that, turning him into a black-suited daredevil in the movie “The Mark of Zorro.”
After the success of Fairbanks’s film, McCulley revived his hero in Fairbanks’ image, one that has been embellished by numerous actors from Tyrone Power to Guy Williams (in the late ’50s Walt Disney TV series) and most recently and successfully by Antonio Banderas – amazingly, the first Latino actor to play the role. Along the way, Zorro was the inspiration for dozens of crime fighters. (Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, paid homage to him by having Bruce Wayne’s parents murdered while coming from a theater where “The Mark of Zorro” was playing.)
Allende has reached into this cultural compost heap of pulp fiction, movies and television and forged a character with a soul and a heritage. Allende (born in Peru, raised in Chile, and in recent years a resident of California) has rooted her story in a re-creation of Latino California and remade her hero, Diego de la Vega, into the first real all-American hero.
The result of a volatile union between a liberal Spanish aristocrat and an enigmatic Sho-
shone Indian who, for love’s sake, “tried to renounce her origins and become a Spanish lady” but who “never stopped dreaming in her own language,” Diego is, literally, a noble savage, one that Rousseau could not have anticipated, imbued with a romanticist’s sense of justice.
“Do you truly believe that life is fair, Señor de la Vega?” he is asked. No, is his reply, “but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.”
Sent to Spain for a classical education, Diego’s innate social consciousness is nourished by contact with early 19th-century radicalism. Initiated into the art of the saber by a Zen-like Jewish master, he learns acrobatic skills and parlor magic from performing gypsies – his costume is the all black outfit, replete with cape and caballero hat. Fleeing the tyranny of French-occupied Spain, Diego sails for the New World, is abducted near New Orleans by the pirate Jean Lafitte and returns to Old California to introduce the natives to Western enlightenment and the Spanish dons to Indian-style justice.
A picaresque novel with post-modern flourishes, the sinfully entertaining “Zorro” is serious fiction masked as a swashbuckler. And with luck, Allende can squeeze as many sequels out of the character as Hollywood has.
Allen Barra, a former writer with The Wall Street Journal, writes from New York.
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Zorro
By Isabel Allende
HarperCollins, 400 pages, $25.95
