Incognito ergo sum

Isabel Allende understands the importance of reinventing oneself. Once a daughter of Chile's first family (her uncle was President Salvador Allende, murdered during a coup in 1973), she became just another Latina immigrant in California and from that low point she metamorphosed into an internationally best-selling writer. Who better then to write the history of Zorro, the prototype of the hero with a dual identity, than Allende? Without Zorro there would have been no Superman, no Batman, no Spiderman.

But despite his cape and mask, which initiated the genre of the masked hero of the present, Zorro is in style and temperament closer to Sir Percy Blakeney of Scarlet Pimpernel fame. Like Sir Percy's drawing of a pimpernel, Zorro leaves behind a motif by which his enemies recognise his work, the famous Z slash mark on walls and sometimes on skin. Like Sir Percy, he is nobly born, the son of a proud Spanish hidalgo and a Native American female warrior chief. And of course there is the fascinating historical background against which both the heroes perform their marvellous deeds of derring-do: the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era that followed just after it.

And yet, what makes Allende's work superior is the depth of detail fuelled by meticulous research. So convincingly does the writer construct a plausible past for her hero, Diego de la Vega, that at times I found that I was suspending disbelief to the extent of feeling I was actually reading a biography rather than a romance.

You get a fascinating insight into the origins of the Pueblo de Los Angeles, a small dusty town with a handful of huts and a mission church, long before it grew into the glittering LA of today. Ancient American Indian rituals are uncovered as the young Diego is initiated into manhood by his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the Medicine Woman of the clan. The treacherous crossing from the New World to the old, across pirate-infested waters heavy with the stench of slave-ships, could well be a book in itself. And the account of life in the city of Barcelona, with its universities, sword fencing schools and courtly manners, makes for absorbing reading, even as the old Spanish ways under the infamous Inquisition start yielding ground to the new ideas of liberty carried over by the French, who, even under Napoleon's imperial designs, retain some vestiges of the ideals of the republic.

Against these multiple backgrounds Allende develops the personality of her hero. A champion of justice, a fighter for the oppressed, whether they are native Americans in California, gypsies in Spain or African slaves in the Caribbean, Diego de la Vega and his transformation into the legendary Zorro make for an irresistible story. All the stock ingredients of the swashbuckling novel are here: duels at dawn, unrequited love, unredeemed villains, tender damsels in distress, breakouts from fearsome fortress prisons. And yet, by some strange alchemy, Isabel Allende turns her tale into something far more profound. There is a depth to the character she creates that is completely unlike the cardboard super heroes of today. Zorro has a moral dimension that is responsive to the times in which he lives. His escapades, though conducted with lighthearted humour, are never undertaken lightly. He assumes responsibility not only for his own actions but also for the society to which he belongs and for all those people who stray into his path and require protection. In a world that is in flux, with changes""political and social""sweeping across Europe and America, Zorro is likewise a mutable, evolving hero, a symbol of enlightenment and justice.

We should all be eternally grateful to the three strangers who knocked at Isabel Allende's door one day in August 2003 and persuaded her to add the story of Zorro to the genre of literature while at the same time providing a past and an identity for the hero of comic books and TV serials and films.

Allende has risen to the challenge magnificently and turned out a book in her own inimitable style, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, as ingeniously plotted as it is elegantly told.

In an interview with The Guardian last year, Allende says, "My grand-daughter once said I have a big imagination. And I said, 'What's a big imagination?', and she said, 'You remember what never happened.'"

Out of the mouths of babes comes the truth.

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ZORRO

Isabel Allende
Harper Perennial
Price: £7.99
Pages: 390