A masquerade in Venice

Antal Szerb Oliver VII Pushkin Press 2013 (1942)

Anybody coming fresh to this novel might assume it was a straightforward comic novel set in some Ruritanian backwater. Many times I found myself thinking that it would make an excellent stage play — its plotting is as complex as a Feydeau farce, and at times it reminded me of Shaw’s Arms and the Man (though the latter is set in Bulgaria rather than an imaginary country). And yet hindsight informs us that this was the Hungarian author’s last work before he was murdered in a Nazi death camp in the closing year of the Second World War. It’s confusing then that there is no hint of the bloody turmoil in the European theatre of war from Szerb’s tale, one centred on a bloodless coup and laced with humorous misunderstandings and engineered coincidences.

Doing nothing in Ruritania

The two cousins Czar Nicholas II and King George V wearing each other’s uniforms

Anthony Hope
The Prisoner of Zenda
Puffin Classics 1994 (1894)

“I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Rudolf?” said my brother’s wife. “You are nine-and-twenty,” she observed, “and you’ve done nothing but—”
“Knock about? It is true. Our family doesn’t need to do things.”

The behaviour of Rudolf Rassendyll, younger brother of Robert Lord Burlesdon, appears to live up to his family motto, which is Nil quae feci (roughly translated as ‘I’ve done nothing’). But by the end of The Prisoner of Zenda Rudolf’s actions have belied that motto – at least according to this account supposedly penned by the young man himself.

Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel is based on the notion of the doppelgänger, a plot device familiar from A Tale of Two Cities and many other novels and films. The bearded Englishman, found resting in a Ruritanian forest, is observed to be a lookalike of the dissolute heir to the throne, also called Rudolf — small wonder because they share a common ancestor in the 18th-century King of Ruritania Rudolf III as well as the tell-tale shock of dark red hair. It’s been suggested that Hope was inspired by the visual similarity of royal cousins Czar Nicholas II and King George V, but whatever the truth of the matter the result is a singularly exciting tale of derring-do. Despite its slow opening, the setting up of the coincidences at the beginning is essential, and Victorian readers were as avid for royal gossip, even of the fictional kind, as their modern counterparts.