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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

In fiction and non-fiction alike, every sentence of Alan Bennett is Alan-Bennettish; every character talks in an Alan-Bennettish way. You’re always aware of the shaping intelligence: amused, interested in banality, shepherding the bathos, slipping the downbeat joke into the afterthought. You’re never in danger of encountering realism.

I do not mean this as a slight. Many great comic writers end up being all about themselves. The world is the occasion for an exercise in style. Everyone in P. G. Wodehouse talks like a Wodehouse character, likewise Runyon and Kingsley Amis, less so, but occasionally, Waugh. If negative capability, or a version of it, is what makes the realist novelist great, the opposite applies to the comic novelist. Take the world, and burlesque it in a way that’s your own.

The way Bennett burlesques the world is so entirely his own that by now there should be a word to identify it. Forget making him a peer of the realm. Let’s give him his own adjective. ‘Bennettesque’ is ugly, and ‘Bennettish’, though I’ve been forced to use it for clarity, sounds altogether too querulous. The Queen is poised to inherit ‘Elizabethan’. I think ‘Alan’ would do.

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