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The Uncommon Reader

Waking up late at the Palace

Alan Bennett
Profile, pp. 128pp, ££10.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 29th August 2007

The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

Here, anyway, she is again. The conceit of the story is that, while walking her corgis round the back of the palace, she chances on the City of Westminster Travelling Library van parked outside the kitchens. Curious, she pokes her head in and meets a kitchen-boy called Norman Seakins, gawky, gay and ginger-haired (‘Saw this extraordinary creature this afternoon,’ the Duke of Edinburgh later remarks. ‘Ginger-stick-in-waiting.’). Inasmuch as HM can fall into conversation with a normal person, she falls into conversation with Norman. She takes a book away, then another and another. She starts, late in life and with growing enthusiasm, to read. Norman, promoted from the kitchen, becomes her amanuensis and literary adviser.

The Uncommon Reader plays, in its light way, with the relationship between the public and the private life, the Queen, as conceived by Bennett in the early stages of the book, being an extreme example of someone who more or less only has a public life. As she reads more, it occurs to her that other people have inner lives. She becomes interested in them. She ceases to ask her subjects on walkabouts whether they have come far, and what the traffic’s like, and instead nonplusses them by asking about books. She wants to quote poetry in her Christmas message, and notices how badly written her address at the state opening of Parliament is. She’s introduced to Alice Munro in person, and becomes a fan.

If he pushed this angle further, Bennett would risk being preachy, but really he’s playing it for laughs. He’s very funny, for example, on how the Queen struggles with social comedy:

There was such a chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the social differences beyond that were somewhat telescoped . . . To begin with at any rate Jane Austen was practically a work of entomology, the characters not quite ants but seeming to the royal reader so much alike as to require a microscope.

From reading, there follows writing. Her Majesty starts to scribble in a notebook. She makes forthright literary-critical sallies that, you strongly suspect, stand in a sideways relationship to Bennett’s own tastes. ‘Am I alone,’ she wonders, ‘in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?’ ‘I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely much of it is opinionated rubbish.’ She starts to pique herself a little on her aphorisms: ‘Etiquette may be bad but embarrassment is worse.’

All of this — not the aphorisms, but the developing of an inner life — is greeted with deep suspicion, then hostility, by those around her. Philip, mostly only interested in shooting things, gets grumpy. Some courtiers worry that reading is ‘elitist’. Others think she has Alzheimer’s: ‘Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.’

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