Mischievous Don Diego, the future Zorro, and his 'milk brother,' Bernardo, move through the California landscape like Western versions of Tom and Huck.īut when the teenage Diego goes to Barcelona to complete his education (another Allende invention), the story falls apart. Her prose is casually sensuous ('power was passed from hand to hand like a coin'), and her characters are large and archetypal, cut from mythic patterns. He leaped from his horse, tore off his heavy uniform jacket, his neckerchief and his hat, and thrust his head into the trough where women were rinsing their wash.' This hard-charging style, nicely captured by Margaret Sayers Peden's translation, is one of Allende's strengths: she dashes off long, sweeping paragraphs that dance with energy. And so, in addition to his aristocratic Spanish father, she provides him with a half-Indian mother, a medicine-woman grandmother and a mysterious transformation, at the end of an ancient Indian ritual, from Diego de la Vega into Zorro, 'the Fox.'Īfter a few pages of historical scene-setting, the narrative begins with a rush: 'Captain Alejandro de la Vega galloped into the mission. (John Updike's version of 'Hamlet' is more about adultery than revenge.) It's not surprising, then, that Allende, a novelist fascinated by family and race, is interested less in her hero's grown-up (so to speak) adventures than in his boyhood. (Much of her writing, the Chilean-American Allende says, is a 'search for my own identity.')īut a writer who takes over someone else's story inevitably reshapes it.

It's easy to see why the elements of the Zorro story would appeal to her - the dashing romantic hero, a champion of the oppressed the exotic Spanish setting of Old California the ready-made theme of disguise and identity.

In addition to her early magic realist fiction ('The House of the Spirits,' 'Of Love and Shadows'), Isabel Allende has written two more conventional historical novels set in the 19th century - 'Daughter of Fortune' and 'Portrait in Sepia' - both of them charming, high-spirited tales grounded in real-life events like the California gold rush. But in most respects it was original, and from the moment Douglas Fairbanks put on his cape and mask and stepped in front of a camera, it was also wildly popular. McCulley was a 36-year-old former police reporter, and his pulp serial 'The Curse of Capistrano' may have been inspired by that most politically incorrect of Robin Hoods, the Scarlet Pimpernel. THE original Zorro seems to have sprung full-blown - and doubtless up to the nearest chandelier - from the head of Johnston McCulley in 1919.

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