"The Prisoner of Zenda" by Anthony Hope

Well, this was a jolly romp of a tale!  Kind of a grown-up version of The Prince and the Pauper, in a way, but with the switch of commoner and royalty being deliberate and done for an actual reason.

Rudolf Rassendyll, a wealthy young man idly wasting his life at gentlemanly nonsense, goes to visit distant relatives in the middle-European (and fictional) country of Ruritania.  There, he meets another Rudolf, his distant cousin who is about to be crowned king.  After a night of drunken revelry, the almost-king is unable to attend his coronation.  His advisors press Rassendyll to take his place so as to avoid scandal and to thwart the new king's brother, who is scheming to take over the country.

You can guess what happens next, right?  It's rather like the movie Dave (1993) -- Rudolf Rassendyll has to keep on pretending to be the new king because the actual king gets kidnapped by his rotten brother and held prisoner in the Castle Zenda.  

Love and intrigue ensue, as the fake king must keep up the pretense of wooing the beautiful Princess Flavia so the real king will be able to marry her eventually.  Fist fights and sword fights and daring rescue attempts also ensue, and it all ends happily for almost everyone.  

Now I want to see the 1937 Ronald Colman movie version because the front cover of my copy is a picture from it :-D

Is this a weighty and thought-provoking book?  Nope.  It is, as I said, a jolly romp, and it's not pretending to be anything else.  Though it did have a few introspective parts, my favorite of which is below.  I love that it actually spawned a minor genre, called Ruritanian Romance.  Hope also wrote a sequel (Rupert of Hentzau) and a prequel (The Heart of Princess Osra), and I'm on the lookout for copies of those now.

Particularly Good Bits:

Ah!  But a man cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm a brain when an uncontrolled passion has battered a breach for them.  Yet, unless he sets up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them.  he is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in giving thanks that power to resist was vouchsafed to him, than in fretting over wicked impulses which come unsought and extort an unwilling hospitality from the weakness of our nature (p. 91).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for swashbuckling violence and veiled commentary about a woman's virtue being threatened.

This has been my 38th book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list, and also my 10th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.