Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.

The mores of Zorro

Yesterday during a quick day-trip to see my parents with my older kids we listened to a great favorite: The Mark of Zorro, a radio drama starring Val Kilmer. I reviewed it here a few years ago. It’s great. Give it a listen.

Something that struck me upon this third or fourth listen was the character of Don Diego de la Vega’s public disguise. Like his most famous imitator, Bruce Wayne, Don Diego adopts a foppish, ineffective persona to prevent his alter ego’s detection. But his playacting goes well beyond providing cover.

Almost all of the other characters have flaws, most of which are characteristic of their class. The old aristocrats of the caballeros fuss over pedigree, protocol, and inheritance. The young caballeros are idlers eager for any ruckus so long as it’s diverting. The merchants and traders care only about money, whether honest businessmen like the tavernkeeper, who is sincerely anxious about being paid by the drunken soldiers who frequent his bar, or swindlers like the hide dealer who tries to defraud a monastery. Low-class soldiers like Sergeant Gonzalez are characterized by pride, braggadocio, and pointless cruelty, while officers like Captain Ramón are pragmatically ruthless and ambitious. And the actual rulers of Alta California are either openly corrupt or easily misled by lying subordinates.

These are recognizable types—all too familiar, I’d say—and understandable. They have all given into the besetting sins of their social station.

But Don Diego’s public weaknesses go much further. Not only is he a weakling and a dandy, he is indifferent to the customs and community that usually incentivize men like him to stand up for others. Nothing has a claim on him. He “abhors violence” of any kind, views marriage as a mutually beneficial economic arrangement, pooh-poohs honor for making men “thin-skinned” and quarrelsome, and is not interested in “being a man” as he prefers simply to be “a human being.” He is a parody of modern culture.

All of which, tellingly, places him beneath contempt. Even the rapacious Captain Ramón despises him. Justifiably.

These themes are present in Johnston McCulley’s original Zorro novel, but the radio adaptation plays them up to great effect. It’s well worth your time to listen to, and think about.

Dramatic irony and plot contrivance

Bates and Anna in Downton Abbey and Abby in Blood Simple

Last night RedLetterMedia posted their review of the first season of “The Acolyte,” the latest Star Wars show. I have no interest whatsoever in watching “The Acolyte” but in the course of Mike and Jay’s discussion Jay specifically critiques it for an overused storytelling technique:

One of my least favorite plot contrivances that’s used for, like, lazy screenwriting is the misunderstanding and the not explaining to a character what is going on because the plot demands it. . . . the lazy contrivance of not knowing all the information and not being told the information because if you were then there would be no story.

I should say “misused” rather than “overused.” What Jay is describing is dramatic irony, a form of literary irony in which the audience knows more than the characters do. This can create tension and pathos as characters ignorant of the full significance of their own actions carry on, ignorant not only of what they’re doing but of the consequences they will face later. Shakespearian and especially Greek tragedy are rich in dramatic irony, as are modern horror and suspense movies—as exemplified by Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb under the table.

But dramatic irony, as Jay suggests, becomes a plot contrivance when the ignorance of the characters is maintained unnaturally. The best example I can think of is “Downton Abbey.” Earlier seasons of the show produce dramatic irony much more organically, but as the show goes on and becomes more obviously a high-toned soap opera, characters get into increasingly melodramatic situations and increasingly refuse to talk to each other about them. Most of the show’s problems could be resolved with one conversation, a conversation the characters will not have.*

This is particularly the case with any plot involving Mr Bates, whose aloof taciturnity is taken to a ridiculous extreme when he is accused of murder—among other things. He has numerous opportunities simply to explain to someone else what is going on and why he is acting in the way that he is, and he doesn’t.** Over and over, “Downton Abbey” prolongs the drama artificially in exactly the same way.

For dramatic irony done not just well but brilliantly, watch Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first film. The film has four primary characters: Abby, the young wife of a shady nightclub owner; Marty, the husband; Ray, a friend with whom Abby begins an affair; and Loren Visser, a private detective. Briefly, Marty hires Visser to look into what Abby and Ray are up to and, when he finds out, pays Visser to kill them. Visser double-crosses and shoots Marty, and Ray discovers the body.

Without giving too much away, as the rest of the movie unfolds:

• Ray thinks that Abby killed Marty (she didn’t) and decides that he has to cover for her

• Abby thinks Marty is still alive and out to get her (he isn’t) and decides to fight back

• Visser thinks he has gotten away with his crime (he hasn’t) until he realizes he has left evidence in Marty’s nightclub, which he thinks Ray and Abby have (they don’t), and decides to eliminate them to cover his tracks

All of the characters operate in ignorance of the whole picture—with the possible exception of Visser, who makes mistakes despite knowing more than Ray and Abby—and make their decisions based on what they think they know, which is often wrong. This ignorance continues right up until the final lines of the film, following a climactic confrontation in which the two surviving characters can’t see each other. And it is unbearably suspenseful rather than, like “Downton Abbey” or “The Acolyte,” merely frustrating.

Dramatic irony is a powerful device, and it’s a shame it isn’t better used. Writers hoping to create tension in their stories through the ignorance or misperceptions of their characters would do well to revisit a movie like Blood Simple, some of Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction, or, even better, go back to Aeschylus and Sophocles.

* This is, I think, part of what makes Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess such a breath of fresh air whenever she appears, as she actually says what she means.

** My wife and I refer to these as “Shan’t” moments, as in “I could resolve this with a simple explanation, but—” turning one’s head away, “shan’t.”

Dr No - a BBC Radio drama

Based on Ian Fleming’s novel, BBC Radio 4’s Dr No stars Toby Stephens as James Bond and David Suchet as Dr Julius No

I grew up on radio dramas—mostly religious ones like “Adventures in Odyssey” or “Patch the Pirate” or, when, to my grief, I woke up in the deep watches of the night with WRAF on my clock radio, the harrowing “Unshackled”—and have enjoyed rediscovering them as an adult and a father. My own kids are getting to know the town of Odyssey’s large cast of characters, and we especially loved “Odyssey”-veteran Paul McCusker’s joyous and intelligent radio drama The Legends of Robin Hood.

But BBC Radio’s literary adaptations have become particular favorites of my family. We’re a third of the way through their classic Lord of the Rings starring Ian Holm, and we have enjoyed their radio adaptations of Treasure Island and the Richard Hannay adventures The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. And there is a great favorite among my kids, The Mark of Zorro, starring Val Kilmer, which I reviewed here a year ago today. Last weekend, I finally delved into their James Bond series.

The first in this series adapts—like the first Bond film—the fifth of Ian Fleming’s original novels, Dr No.

Dr No takes place several months after From Russia With Love, which ends on a stunning cliffhanger requiring Bond, in the followup, to have undergone extensive convalescence. The radio drama opens with Bond’s briefing from M, who wants to make sure Bond is fully recovered but still gives Bond what he thinks will be an easy assignment. One Commander Strangways, a key intelligence operative in Jamaica, has gone missing along with his secretary. The gossips have already concluded that the pair created false identities for themselves and eloped, but M wants Bond to make sure.

Bond departs Britain both relaxed and resentful. He is glad to be back in the Caribbean and working with a Jamaican local, Quarrel, who gave him life-saving assistance in Live and Let Die, but his familiarity with Jamaica and his resentment of the simple job given to him by M cause him to let his guard down. He immediately regrets it. A Chinese girl claiming to work for the Daily Gleaner snaps his photo as he arrives at the airport, and reappears when he and Quarrel have dinner and drinks at a Kingston dive. His suspicions are aroused and never allayed.

Bond encounters another Chinese girl working as a secretary for a local contact. The contact informs Bond that Strangways had been investigating one Dr Julius No, the reclusive owner and operator of a guano mine—which he works exclusively with imported Chinese labor—on nearby Crab Key. Asked to retrieve the files on the case, the secretary reveals that they are missing.

Though Quarrel warns him off of approaching Crab Key, which has a bad reputation—especially after a series of strange accidents involving representatives of the Audobon Society, who have taken an interest in the rare birds that nest on Dr No’s island—Bond decides to investigate more directly.

Quarrel and Bond make the 20-mile voyage to Crab Key by night and, the next morning, meet Honeychile Rider as she gathers shells on the beach. When Dr No’s men arrive and machine gun Honey’s canoe, the three form an ad hoc team as they work both to uncover what Dr No is doing and to survive long enough to escape the island. Not all of them will make it, and the danger will only grow crueler and more grotesque once Dr No captures them.

BBC Radio 4’s adaptation, first broadcast in 2008, hews very closely to Ian Fleming’s novel, even retaining many of the rough edges I would have expected to be sanded off in a modern adaptation—and kudos to them for letting the story be of its time and place. Sticking close to Fleming’s originals is always a plus. Dr No has always impressed me with its strong writing, characterization—especially for Honey Rider—suspense, and grim, brutal survivalist climax. Take what you imagine a Bond film to be like, remove the campiness of the worst of the movies, and cross it with The Most Dangerous Game, and you’re approaching the tone of this book. The adaptation conveys Bond’s doggedness and Dr No’s cruelty expertly, and the story builds steadily in excitement and intensity right up until the end.

The voice acting is excellent across the board. Toby Stephens, who played Bond villain Gustav Graves in the execrable Die Another Die and gave an outstanding audiobook performance of From Russia With Love, is very good as James Bond. Stephens’s Bond combines intelligence and a hard edge where screen Bonds often skew toward one or the other. Lisa Dillon and Clarke Peters offer solid support as Honeychile Rider and Quarrel—Quarrel and Bond’s strong laird and gamekeeper relationship is an often overlooked friendship in the Bond stories—and fans of certain British media will enjoy Peter Capaldi’s brief appearance as The Armourer, Major Boothroyd, the character who first equipped Bond with the Walther PPK and who eventually evolved into the films’ Q.

The standout, however, is David Suchet as Dr No. The villain only appears in the film third or so of the story and has limited “onscreen” time with Bond, but Suchet makes the most of it. His halting, metallic, alien voice is eerie and threatening, and the way he delivers his life story and cold, amoral, transhumanist worldview to Bond and Honey seems believable rather than the mere “monologuing” lampooned in The Incredibles. If, like me, you know Suchet primarily as Poirot, this performance should prove a startling surprise.

Dr No also features good sound effects that set the scene well, especially scenes on the beaches, in the mangrove swamps, and in the warehouses, subterranean quarters, and deathtraps of Crab Key. The adaptation’s original music by Mark Holden and Sam Barbour is a nice accent to the story, invoking the sound of classic Bond film scores without aping it.

For those with children, Dr No may be on the intense side. I listened to it with my kids and they were engrossed by it, finding the story unbearably suspenseful and Dr No unbearably creepy. I selected this one to listen to with them both because it was the first in this series and because I knew the novel had more action and less sex than some of the other stories. That held true for the adaptation, too. Aside from a scattering of mild language—most of it rather blunt discussions of Dr No’s bird guano—it was a good listen for my kids.

If the adaptation has any flaws, it is only through sins of omission rather than commission. This radio drama is just under ninety minutes long, and so while all the major events of the novel are present, they have been streamlined. The novel’s characters are presented well and excellently performed, but some of the depth of the novel has been lost. Bond’s resentments and his interiority are downplayed. Honey tells a shortened version of her tragic backstory—which I wrote about briefly a few months ago—but her goals and her reason for being on Crab Key are not elaborated upon. Likewise, I know why Bond was in the hospital for so long before the events of this story, but someone less familiar with the novels may not. I had to explain a little bit of that to my kids. But these are minor complaints.

The upside of this short adaptation is precisely that it is short—right at an hour and a half, an hour and a half spent on a perfectly paced and executed action-suspense story, perfect for a shorter holiday road trip or a quiet evening listening to the radio.

I had heard lots of good things about these radio adaptations of Fleming’s novels, and now I know why. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, the 2010 dramatization of Goldfinger, starring Stephens as Bond and Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger. You can listen to Dr No, Goldfinger, and the rest of the series in this YouTube playlist.

If you’re traveling over the holidays I hope BBC Radio 4’s Dr No will give y’all a good hour and a half of thrills, and that you’ll go on to listen to more, as I plan to. Even better, read some Ian Fleming in the new year! Regardless, have a merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.

Señor Zorro en la radio

I have a soft spot for swashbucklers—stories of nobility, derring-do, skill with a blade, and unflappable wit in the face of danger—and that’s almost certainly because of Zorro. We had a Disney singalong tape with the “Zorro” theme song when I was a kid, and one of my earliest memories is telling my mom that, when I grew up, I wanted to legally change my name to Zorro. Happily, she dissuaded me—not that I needed convincing once I was actually grown up.

So I shed the enthusiasm for the name but my love of swashbucklers has only deepened with time, especially once I got around to reading a bunch of the classics a few years ago—among them The Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Blood, and my two favorites, The Prisoner of Zenda and The Mark of Zorro. The last of these introduced the world to my favorite swashbuckling hero and has been adapted for film, however loosely, several times. It’s also the basis of the excellent audio drama I want to review today.

When romance and rapiers ruled in Old California

The story takes place in “Old California,” specifically the pueblo of Reina de los Angeles—a considerably sleepier LA than we’re accustomed to imagine—and begins in medias res, as the drunken layabout Sergeant Gonzalez demands more wine of the local tavern keeper and boasts of what he plans to do when he finally catches up to the notorious bandit El Zorro. El Zorro shortly presents himself, the first of many unexpected, ninja-like appearances, and humiliates Gonzalez by slashing a Z into the brute’s cheek before disappearing, unharmed, into the night. The scene is set.

This semi-comic opening also establishes Don Diego de la Vega, the handsome young scion of one of California’s aristocratic caballero families. Don Diego is well-educated and fantastically wealthy, belonging to one of the only caballero families that seems to be thriving under the corrupt rule of California’s governor, but he’s timid, unmotivated, horrified by the violence often required of men of his station, and—relatedly—uninterested in any of the duties or recreational pursuits of his class, whether marriage, bull-fighting, or farming. He’s a dandy. No one takes him seriously.

While Gonzalez and his villainous, resentful superior, Captain Ramón, step up their hunt for Zorro, Don Diego’s father Don Alejandro puts fatherly pressure on Diego to find a wife. Don Alejandro recommends the family of Don Carlos Pulido, who has a beautiful and eligible only daughter. Don Diego duly pays the Pulidos a visit, impressing the whole family with his looks and wealth—seemingly his only good features. Doña Catalina immediately presses her daughter to marry Don Diego just to save their family, which has been caught on the wrong side of political disputes, from disaster. But their daughter, the spirited and virtuous Señorita Lolita Pulido, is repulsed by Don Diego’s foppishness and resists her parents’ insistence on the match.

Unfortunately, as Don Diego feebly pursues courtship with her she also becomes the object of Captain Ramón’s interest—but not his affections, as he is strictly an ambitious and cruel striver.

Meanwhile, Señor Zorro continues his Robin Hood attacks on corrupt officials, especially those who are cruel to the poor—the laboring peons and native indios—or clergymen like Fray Felipe, a hardworking and pious Franciscan with close ties to the Pulidos and Vegas. Captain Ramón takes extreme measures to root out Zorro, who enjoys widespread support among the downtrodden, including arresting and publicly whipping Fray Felipe on false charges. Zorro’s sudden appearance and rescue of the monk—not to mention the vengeance Zorro wreaks as a result—is one of the story’s most thrilling scenes.

There’s much more. Don Diego’s continues his tonedeaf and awkward courtship of Señorita Lolita, while she falls for a man who is Diego’s opposite in every way, the dashing and courageous Señor Zorro. The young, up and coming caballeros of Reina de los Angeles—minus Don Diego, to the derisive amusement of the other young men and the embarrassment of his father—form an honor-bound league to track down and defeat Zorro and save California from his depredations. And Captain Ramón, with increasing desperation and disregard for protocol or morality, attempts to win—or simply acquire—Señorita Lolita.

Part comedy of manners, part adventure story, part superhero thriller, part historical melodrama, party mystery (though you won’t have to try hard at all to guess Zorro’s secret identity)—the swashbuckling and charismatic central character ties all of these elements together, and by the end of The Mark of Zorro all of these threads come together in a fun and exciting climax. It’s pulp, but it’s fun, clever pulp, with a few nice surprises along the way and just the right combination of daring, danger, and death.

The audio drama

The Mark of Zorro originally appeared—as The Curse of Capistrano—in serial installments in All Story Weekly in the late summer of 1919. Over the 102 years since, the plot has been treated as disposable by its numerous adapters, but this 2010 full-cast audio dramatization by Yuri Rasovsky follows the original very faithfully. The plot is condensed and streamlined but most of the major incidents remain in three nicely constructed one-hour episodes. Señorita Lolita has been given a light feminist update, asking for a sword in the final confrontation rather than standing by for Zorro to finish the job, but these touches are purely cosmetic and don’t actually alter the story or its themes.

The music and sound effects, crucial in an audio drama like this, are also top quality, comparable to any of the well-produced stuff I grew up listening to. This dramatization, I am unsurprised to learn, earned a Grammy nomination.

The cast are excellent, with the two standouts being Val Kilmer, who successfully pulls off both the confident and strong Zorro and his weakling alter ego Don Diego with a great deal of wit, panache, and—for Señorita Lolita—charm; and Meshach Taylor as Sergeant Gonzalez, a real miles gloriosus whose swagger, braggadocio, and oblivious selfishness make him both a figure of fun and a genuine threat, especially under the leadership of Captain Ramón. Gonzalez, as my description suggests, is a literary type that goes back to the Romans, but Taylor’s performance removes him from the world of cliché and makes him a believable and entertaining character.

Keith Szarabajka as Captain Ramón and Ruth Livier as Señorita Lolita are also good, with Szarabajka’s Ramón being cold and threatening but not over-the-top. Elizabeth Peña, as Doña Catlina, Lolita’s marriage-obsessed mother, seems to be performing her part sarcastically sometimes but this does not detract from the overall production. Armin Shimerman, as the landlord of the tavern where Gonzalez runs up a huge tab, is also great fun, put-upon but ironic, and his framing narration also sets the imaginative stage quite excellently.

The Mark of Zorro was great fun to listen to both for myself, the lifelong Zorro fan, and my wife and kids. Both the six- and four-year olds enjoyed it a great deal even if they didn’t follow every contortion of the plot, and thrilled to the chases and swordfights.

What makes The Mark of Zorro great

While The Mark of Zorro is enormously entertaining, what makes the story great and worth revisiting is its serious treatment of honor and virtue. These move the plot, motivate the characters, and make their actions comprehensible.

Don Diego adopts his alter ego out of his sense of obligation to the less fortunate, the despised and abused, and the audio drama explicitly invokes the idea of noblesse oblige—an idea running all the way through but never named in the novel. (An understanding of noblesse oblige is also what’s missing in all those idiotic internet discussions of Batman as a “fascist.”) Zorro is a check on the abuses of his peers and a boon to his inferiors, and holds himself to the same exacting standards as any opponent, refusing to engage in an unfair fight, to “punch down” against an inferior with disproportionate force, or to exaggerate his deeds—or allow others to lie about him. Even his use of deception and disguise is a form of filial piety, as he does not want his vigilantism in the face of a corrupt government to endanger his innocent father. Zorro observes limits, because there are greater things than himself at stake.

And this concern with honor and virtue runs through all of the characters—all of the good ones, that is. Señorita Lolita values courage, good looks, education, and wealth, but rejects all of them when they appear in a coward. She rightly expects more, and her hierarchy of virtues, her priorities, are correct and as exacting as Don Diego’s. Don Carlos and Doña Catilina, while played for laughs at first as they attempt, with embarrassing desperation, to get her daughter to marry Don Diego, reveal hidden depths when Zorro, a man they believe to be a villain, appears in their home. Don Carlos in particular repeatedly proves himself to be tougher than he lets on. Don Alejandro, Don Diego’s father, drives his son toward marriage not out of naked interest in wealth or inheritance but out of sense of obligation and stewardship, a trait that is also highly developed in his son, as it turns out.

And even the dashing, high-living young caballeros of California’s aristocratic elite have been so formed and educated that, when they finally confront Zorro and attempt to subdue him, he wins them over not through some kind of cost-benefit analysis or politicking or rhetorical argument about rights and corruption, but by appealing to their understanding of the duty they owe thanks to their status and the honor of serving justice.

(This last was one of my favorite surprises when I first read The Mark of Zorro. As I wrote on Goodreads after that first reading, “Pay attention, Hollywood! You can use character to resolve plot, and not just bigger fight scenes!”)

The only purely pragmatic characters are the villains, especially Captain Ramón, whose virtues in a number of areas—especially courage and skill with a blade—are ruined by his resentment, his ambition, and his self-serving pragmatism. This is never clearer than when he tries to force his courtship (much too fine a word for his intentions) on Señorita Lolita. His dishonorable but effective brutality makes his comeuppance—as well as those of the venal governor of California and the boastful Sergeant Gonzalez, who nevertheless gets the last word—at the hands of the moral and law-abiding all the more satisfying. The finale of the story is almost a dramatization of Burke’s dictum that “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”

In our cynical age, a story like The Mark of Zorro comes across as black-and-white, simplistic, without the lauded “moral ambiguity” so sought after in prestige TV. But look beneath, past that platitudinous criticism, and you’ll witness a balletic dance of virtue, reputation, honor, and honesty that demonstrates, in its fun and pulpy way, just how simplistic the opposite really is.

Conclusion

This is ostensibly a review of the excellent full-cast audio drama by Hollywood Theater of the Ear, and I hope you’ll check that out and enjoy it. With holiday travel approaching as I write this, it may be an excellent way to pass three hours on the road with your family. My wife, kids, and I certainly enjoyed it over our Thanksgiving travels. But I hope you’ll seek out The Mark of Zorro in book or movie form as well. I have the Penguin Classics edition, but it is widely available from other publishers, including for free online at Project Gutenberg, and if you check out a film version, the 1940 adaptation starring Tyrone Power is loose but broadly faithful to the book and a lot of fun, with the excellent Basil Rathbone offering a serious swordfighting challenge to Señor Zorro.

Chesterton on talking to oneself

From a piece he wrote critiquing his own play, Magic: 

“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Magic is a wonderful little comedy that I read some years ago during a bout of depression. It deals with faith, reason, and skepticism on the scale of ordinary life. The most dramatic thing that happens in this play, in which characters furiously debate whether magic is, in fact, real, is a lamp turning on. 

With characteristically Chestertonian wit and humor, Magic insists on faith and reason, rather than faith or reason, and dramatizes the impoverishment of humanity when the two are opposed. But it's not a straight allegory or morality play; Chesterton leaves things ambiguous, including the very subject of the play. 

If it's so ambiguous, then what's the point? you might want to ask. I don't know, but Magic was exactly what I needed when I read it, the same way many people claimed to have been saved from madness by Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday. To quote his introduction to the book of Job, in reference to God's refusal to answer Job's questions: 

The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Magic has been revived a few times in out of the way places by fellow devotees of Chesterton. (Here's a review of a production from about the time I read the play.) It's never been staged anywhere close enough for me to see it performed, but I hope that will change someday. 

In the mean time, do check Magic out. It's a short three act play; you can easily read it through in one sitting. It's available free at Project Gutenberg and in volume 11 of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, which is still a work in progress (at 37 volumes!) from Ignatius Press.