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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

The Prime Minister insists it be discouraged. Books go missing when Her Majesty puts them down, and are claimed to have been exploded by the bomb squad. Annoyed by the preferment of young Norman, HM’s go-ahead private secretary, the splendidly named Sir Kevin, starts scheming to do him down. There’s not much to the plot. There’s not much to the book — in the best way. It’s partly a sly reading-list, partly the story of a friendship, and mostly a series of lovely jokes.

This is not a book that is particularly interested in telling us what the Queen is like. Fair enough; it’s fiction. It is not a book, either, that is particularly interested in imagining plausibly what the Queen might be like. Rather, it vamps round the stock ideas, available to any television sketch show or student revue, of what she is like. Bennett’s Queen uses ‘one’, incorrectly, in free variation with ‘I’. She tolerates prime ministers. She is fond of her corgis, which are hated by her courtiers. She teases her courtiers subtly but deliberately. She asks people ‘have you come far?’ She is able to
telegraph, firmly but without rudeness, when an audience is over. Her husband is gruff and calls her ‘old girl’.

What’s different, then, between The Uncommon Reader and any television sketch show or student revue? The difference is in the sentences. What distinguishes this, and most of Bennett’s work, is not its perceptiveness about the world, or its imaginative achievement, but its droll and exact stylistic commmand.

The effect, in this and in much of his work, is to make him the literary equivalent of a brilliant cartoonist. He somehow appropriates the cliché of what the Queen is like and fits it into the Alan Bennett universe. What she’s like, in that universe, is Alan Bennett. Would tea at the palace — as opposed to the WI — be accompanied by ‘ham, tongue, mustard and cress, scones, cakes and even a trifle’?

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