What if Princess Diana hadn’t died, but, aided by her besotted press secretary, had faked her death and fled to America to live under an assumed identity? Is this an interesting question? Is a novelist justified in exploring such a supposition? I believe the answer to both questions is ‘no’. In writing Untold Story, Monica Ali has made a serious mistake.
Ali relocates Diana, ten years on, to a dull American town called Kensington (geddit?). Kensington’s chief claim to fame is a particularly successful undertaker’s establishment. (The implicit ironies remain unexplored; like most of the novel’s thematic trails, this one peters out). Diana, now called Lydia, her hair dyed dark, her nose surgically altered, finds a direction for her famous caring abilities at a dogs’ rescue centre. Three sterotyped women — dressy blonde Amber, plump scruffy Suzie, kooky Tevis — provide the undemanding, supportive friendship denied her in ‘real’ life. There is an equally bland, good-natured suitor, Carson, who cuts down trees, fixes blueberry pancakes for her breakfast, and looks good in his jeans. Has ‘Lydia’ found the cosy normality Diana always (apparently) craved?
Lydia’s only link to her past is a hidden box of cuttings about the sons she left behind. However, she feels secure enough to abandon her brown contact lenses, and this is her undoing. Enter ‘Grabber’ Grabowski, a paparazzo who once got his living and his kicks out of shadowing the Princess. Uncanny that he should turn up in this same backwoods town. Grabowski is a cardboard villain with unusual powers of observation. He unmasks Lydia by noticing the small greenish rim encircling one of her irises. Spying on her at night, hiding in the bushes outside her house, he can see through the distant window that her eyes are red. He breaks in, she turns a gun on him, and he observes the tiny gold flecks glinting in her deep blue iris.
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