These days, with all we're able to find out, and know, and believe, and believe but not know, and know but not believe, if you've hit thirty and not yet had some kind of existential crisis, then you're among the an increasingly small minority.

Good for you! And I mean that very sincerely.

I'm not one of those people. In recent years, thinking about this kind of thing has become more and more of a habit. For me there's an image of a gravestone, a very simple gravestone on a very simple patch of grass that (very simply) reads,

'Here lies ~. He never finished anything.'

And I feel horribly alone and inadequate. And then I sometimes stop and consider that, no, I'm thinking about things the wrong way. Nothing is left unfinished. Everything is complete in its own way, just not in the way we might have imagined. And sometimes, the fact that it's incomplete lends more power and colour our imagining of how it might end.

I then end up telling myself to stop making excuses and get on with what I'm doing, but that's beside the point.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that 'Buttercup's Baby', the non-existent sequel to a (brilliant) novel posing as an abridgement of a full (also non-existent) novel, set in a non-existent country, is a testament to the power of things being left unfinished. The best books end well. In life stories tend to just stop. This might be why The Princess Bride and its 'sequel' feels so real.

Of course, it's not real. It doesn't take a Sicilian in the 1500s referencing Australia (1788 at the earliest) to spot that.

It also doesn't take a literature professor to note how an 'abridgement' follows almost perfect narrative beats, while the 'original' is bloated with, among other things, thirty pages describing Florinese trees. The whole novel (Goldman's novel) is 493 pages. Minus his introduction and fun interludes, you're left with about two thirds of that. If the claims of all these interminable passages on fashion, royal families, Buttercup's training and fetching holocaust cloaks are to be believed, you'd be left with the book version of a steak that was about 80% gristle.

The idea alone is hard to swallow. But it's these kinds of details, and playing with truth and fiction, that made me wonder how Goldman was able to conjure somewhere that was so obviously absurd, but threaded through enough reality for it to somehow seem believable. I felt the same way watching Christopher Nolan's Inception (2011). In an age saturated by CGI and special effects, there were some camera tricks in that (remember the turning hallway?) which made me lean forward and think, 'Wait, how…?' I felt the same way about The Princess Bride. He wove in incredible tapestry of real and unreal, and I sincerely pity scholars how ever many hundreds of years from now who are going to try and unpick it. If, by some chance, they happen to be reading this, I'll save them some time.

Assuming it was almost entirely made-up nonsense, I did some digging of my own. Florin was obviously made up. Morgenstern and the 'original' Princess Bride were also obviously made up. I dived headlong into all the writing I could find on the subject (like Fezzik into the whirlpool in Goldman's teaser of Buttercup's Baby) determined to put to rest the nagging feeling that some of it might actually be true. The way he was able to make Florin, somewhere so obviously fake, seem like a real place turned out to be very simple.

It actually is a real place.

Of course, the country isn't called Florin (Goldman seemed almost prescient of Googlemaps becoming a thing), but if you follow the trail of breadcrumbs he leaves hidden in the book (some very cheekily hidden), you will sure enough find a region (not a country) that matches the descriptions almost perfectly. When I went there to see for myself (because, of course, there was still no way it could be true), I was left standing at site after site in an increasingly incredulous daze. It was almost all true, but ever so slightly off from how Goldman described it. You know how sometimes people flip movies on Youtube to stop it being flagged? This felt like a proto-version of that. Short(ish) version of some examples:

- As said before, it's not a country, but a region (vassal state at the time, if you want to get technical)

- The Cliffs of Insanity are indeed real, but the name is based on a pun. 'Zanati' is old Turkish (thanks Fezzik) for 'consciousness'. In-zaniti is therefore unconsciousness or faintness, or as one might commonly experiences at the edge of a tall cliff - vertigo. They're also not quite as tall as he claimed, but certainly tall enough.

- The Fire Swamp is real (and very gassy) place, but there are no huge rats and the air doesn't spontaneously burst into flames. According to Angelica (our wonderful guide), the story came from a neighbouring army trying to pull a fast one and sneak around the beaten path to attack from the side, during the night. Night means torches. Torches and flammable gas means, well…

- The Zoo of Death. This one really surprised me. There was no way such a Theseus and the Minotaur of a location could be real. It's real, but it's not a Zoo (the oldest zoo being founded in Vienna in 1752). It's also not underground. No-one, not even a giant bat, could hear death wails five floors down, no matter how horrific. At the top of a five-storey tower, on the other hand, that would certainly carry. Like The Tower of London, it's a popular if grim tourist attraction (4.83 on Tripadvisor).

There are many, many more examples I could give of my mind being blown this way and that way, but I'd be here forever. In short, It's a very weird feeling to find out that what you were told was true, but obviously wasn't, actually was. It's also weird that, looking back, it makes perfect sense. If a country like Liechtenstein can exist (also lacking an airport), then 'Florin' absolutely can as well. It's anonymity seems to have persisted solely on the fact that while we can find almost anything we wish to these days, we're often too lazy, or simply don't think to look for it.

Finding out that it (let's still call it Florin, for dramatic effect) was a real place, I thought would soften the disappointment of confirming that the original Princess Bride was an invention.

It didn't, because it's not.

Like almost everything else Goldman was alluding to, it was based very heavily on something real. Morgenstern isn't the name of the original author, The Princess Bride is a bit of a simplified, more fairytale translation of the original title, and he was exaggerating just how many pages the author spent describing trees, but otherwise it matches Goldman's descriptions to a tee. Think of the great 16th century Japanese novel Genji Monogatari and you'll have a vague idea in terms of the real book. It's a corker, full of all kinds of interesting things that all kinds of people will find interesting at various different points, in the book and in their lives. And the real kicker (at long last) was to discover that not only was 'The Princess Bride' real, but so was its follow-up. I couldn't believe what I was holding in that library, after all this time thinking it was a big practical joke. You start questioning all kinds of things, and there's a curious sensation of almost floating out of yourself while you re-evaluate what's actually real.

Buttercup's Baby is actually real; or, to give it its full title:

Buttercup's Baby - The Trials and Rise of Waverly Roberts

It might not written by not-Morgenstern, but it was a direct continuation, from roughly the same era, and began just as Goldman described.

Reading the sample chapter at the end of Goldman's abridged version, it's crazy to see how clearly a full story was being set up, like he couldn't resist nudging the reader once more to have a real look (he didn't add this teaser chapter until the 90s, adding another meta layer to everything, after all). Reading the rest of it felt like an enormous payoff to a treasure hunt no-one knew they should have been taking seriously.

I only had time to skim-read the library copy once during our whistle-stop tour (I made the mistake of assuming there would be little to find). Next time I'm definitely finding my own way there, and next time I'll get some actual passages. But for now, I'll leave you with some of the points I was able to get down:

- The title, Buttercup's Baby, encapsulates one of the key themes of the book - that children rarely turn out the way parents imagine. Buttercup knew Waverly was going to be a boy. She also knew she was going to be a new Westley. In some ways she was, and in others she became far more.

- It's set almost entirely on The Revenge, and is swashbuckling adventure telling the story of (as the title suggests) Waverly's rise from deck scrubber to inheriting the title once held by her father, that of the Dread Pirate Roberts him(her)self. Suffice to say, Waverly becomes quite the character. Imagine a dashing young woman with the appetite of a viking and the panache of a musketeer, and you'll have something beginning to capture it. Her and her crews exploits around the high seas on board The Revenge are tremendous fun, even from what little I managed to skim through. It's also a story about, and it breaks my heart to say it…

- Revenge, which means that, no, Fezzik didn't survive the fall. I briefly hated Goldman for suggesting that he did, but in hindsight there would have been no story if he had. Imagine it. He's wounded, but ultimately OK, he helps Waverly get back to everyone, and with everyone they uncover and defeat the villains trying to undo their happiness. As comfortable as that is, it's an epilogue, not a story, and it's about Fezzik, not Waverly - Buttercup's Baby.

If this happens, she never has to fend for herself. She never has to follow in the footsteps of Inigo, and duel The Five Masters. She never meets Giulietta. She never has to bluff, and fail, then bluff again with twice the stakes. She never discovers her feelings for Pierre. Things never happen. And, most importantly for me, she never discovers who the invader in Fezzik really was, and where it ends up taking her.

No, instead, the one closest to her dies, and the rest of the family become separated. Humperdinck's revenge via The Madman (a horrifyingly persistent and shifting nemesis, as it turns out) seems to at last be complete. Except, of course, it isn't. Waverly survives, and from there it's all about how she can gain the ability to strike back, save those that can be saved, and put an end to the ultimate antagonist since the start of her parents' story. It's very much in the classical Greek vein (or Godfather Part 2, if you prefer something more recent):

The Hero is driven away from home.

The Hero travels the world.

The Hero overcomes a great challenge.

The Hero, strengthened by the challenge, returns home triumphant.

It's the Odyssey. It's Jason and the Argonauts. It's Theseus and Minotaur. It's the classic adventure story.

And lastly, from what I could glean from the introduction, it seems to be a story about what we gain from those around us. Waverly overcomes her challenges one by one, by drawing from the strength and lessons learnt from those nearest and dearest to her:

Fezzik's heart and bravery.

Inigo's determination and skill.

Westley's unbreakable endurance,

Buttercup's love and faith.

They all lend a strength to her that lets her overcome one challenge after another, until ultimately she is ready to take on her real enemies, and get back that which is dearest to her. And in doing all this, she also becomes something more. Something beyond the sum of her parts. Her old family inspires her, and she in turn inspires the new. I think, ultimately, it's a story about how, if we try, we can exceed all expectations, even our own cynical ones we set ourselves. And I think, in the end, that's probably the greatest tribute to those who came before us, the greatest hope for those who come after, and makes everything we do worthwhile.

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