Zorro: the Novel, by Isabel Allende, trans Margaret Sayers Peden

In a short story, Philip Jose Farmer posited a parallel universe in which the Burroughs who chronicled Tarzan was William S rather than Edgar Rice. This current incongruous juxtaposition of author and title renders an equivalent double-take irresistible. It sounds like the first move in a new game to match literary novelists to pulp icons. What price Paul Auster's The Shadow? Or Thomas Pynchon's Terminator?

The original Zorro ("the fox") was created for All-Story magazine in 1919 by pulp-meister Johnston McCulley as a Mexicali variant on the grand archetype of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel - the indolent aristo whose languidly fatuous façade conceals the daredevil man of action. Imagine Bertie Wooster as James Bond's secret identity. Bruce "Batman" Wayne is Zorro's most obvious comic-book descendant.

The vital difference between the Pimpernel and Zorro, however, is that Sir Percy Blakeney's alter ego dedicates himself to rescuing his fellow aristos from receiving what many might consider their just deserts during the French Revolution, whereas Diego Vega is an enthusiastic class traitor defending the poor and downtrodden against tyrannical overlords.

Isabel Allende leaves few swashes unbuckled as she follows her protagonist from the late 18th to the early 19th century, exploring the history of California along the way. She never condescends to the material and, as a grandmaster of magic realism, gives Diego's saga a smooth, limpid flow. The son of a Spanish grandee and a Shoshone woman warrior, Diego learns from both his Indian family and the cream of Europe in order to become the swordsman, horseman, acrobat, tracker, actor, cardsharp and illusionist he needs to be to create "Zorro", reclaim his father's estates, pursue the woman he loves and become a masked champion of justice.

Literary novelists traditionally treat the artefacts of popular culture as objets trouvés rather than artistic creations in their own right. One aspect of the final product that niggles this reader, at least, is the absence of even token acknowledgement that Allende has retooled and reinterpreted an already-existing mythos built up by divers hands over decades. Meanwhile, this may be an anomaly in the Zorro saga and the Allende oeuvre, but it is a highly entertaining one. As high culture-low-culch throwdowns go, it beats Ang Lee's Hulk.

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