This is a gem of a novella. Written by Alan Bennett, and published in 2007, it was lent to me (with a warm recommendation) by a friend.

The premise is that Britain's late Queen, Elizabeth II, is running after an errant corgi when she bumps into the Westminster Council library van at the back entrance to Buckingham Palace. She meets Mr Hutchins (who drives the vehicle, and administers its collection) and Norman Seakins (who is employed in the royal kitchens, but is a keen reader). Her Majesty feels duty-bound to borrow a book.



And so it begins. The Queen becomes a reader... She promotes Norman to "amanuensis", and rapidly discovers all the things that we book-addicts already know:

-- "How one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do";

-- How you can't read without some form of note-taking equipment;

-- How books are not about passing the time, but about experiencing other lives, and other worlds -- so they soften you, make you more tolerant (as the Queen puts it: "At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak, they tenderise one");

-- How books become all-important, and sap your enthusiasm for other things (in her case, her endless round of fairly pointless duties);

-- How, indeed, reading makes you examine your life;

-- How it contrasts with "briefing": "Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive, and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up."

-- How you start to develop your reading "muscle", so that things that are hard at first become less so;

-- How reading makes you want to find your own "voice", so from reading, it's a natural step to writing...


Kensington Palace, 2016

Inevitably, though, there's push-back. Her equerries definitely don't like this new enthusiasm, and worry that reading might be considered "elitist"(!); the prime minister doesn't like being encouraged to read things (he "did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it"); and the staff don't like the public's new habit of offering books to the monarch rather than flowers ("If I'd wanted to carry books around I'd have got a job at Hatchard's...").

The opposition becomes more tangible. The box of books the Queen wants to accompany her on a state visit mysteriously goes astray; and Norman is sent off to university.

But the Queen has the answer. The end of the book finds her announcing to a meeting of the Privy Council that she's writing her book -- and abdicating.



***

There's so much to love about this slim work.

Clearly, it's written by someone with a passion for books -- someone who gets this whole reading thing 100 per cent.

And, for people who get all excited when their books come with built-in extension reading lists, this one is quite perfect (I've been meaning for a while to try Ivy Compton-Burnett and Mary Renault, and J.R. Ackerley and Denton Walsh sound most intriguing...)

Plus, it's brilliantly observed...

There's the royal language ("one is a pensioner"; "have you come far?").

There are amusing pointers to the trials of aging. Here, for example, is a dialogue between Elizabeth and Philip, after Cecil Beaton has come up in the conversation:

-- Dead, I suppose.
-- Who?
-- The Beaton fellow.
-- Oh yes. Everybody's dead.



There's the canny skewering of that peculiarly British tendency to patronize and stereotype anything that has to do with New Zealand, as with this little exchange with Sir Kevin (a Kiwi):

-- Any news from home? Busy shearing away?
-- Not at this time of year, ma'am.
-- Oh. Out to grass.

And although Bennett's Queen is a sympathetic figure, it's clear that he thinks the institution is grotesque and unjust. "One has given," says Elizabeth Regina in the speech that will be her swan-song, "one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought, the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots... Sometimes one has felt like a scented candled, sent in to perfume a regime or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant."

This seems like a Bennett theme... I first saw The Madness of King George in 1995, the year it came out, and noted in my diary: "I think this film is one of the best pleas ever for a republic. Kingdoms are cruel -- to the king, as well as to the subjects. George was likeable when sane -- but none the less reactionary; hidebound by conventions that wouldn't even allow the doctor to ask about his symptoms; already mad with the delusion that the world revolved around him, a delusion propped up by a thousand courtiers and parliamentary servants. The 'restoration' of the king to the cardboard cut-out figure waving and smiling from a balcony is a restoration from one kind of madness to another. The film could have been entitled The Madness of Kingship. Deluded in the capsule world of the constitutional monarch, jostled and manipulated almost as much when well as when ill, constantly intrigued against by family and politicians, he is a figure who says, without knowing it because he cannot know such things, that human beings should not be kings. His greatest happiness seemed to be in quietly reading Shakespeare in an orchard. There he was at his sanest. But he cannot be left there because he is a pawn in a powerful political game. So he is shipped off to London to 'appear'."

Many of these points, though made more gently, recur in The Uncommon Reader.


The perils of being a royal...

***

That little excursion back into the diary reminded me how much I used to appreciate Bennett. Back in the early 1990s when audio-books (on cassette tapes!) helped me survive my long commutes to work, I listened to Forty Years On (brilliant both at whipping up nostalgia and mocking it), and A Woman of No Importance (observant, funny, and haunting all at the same time).

A few years later, in the mid-1990s, I read Writing Home (1994), which I loved. Among many other things, Bennett mentions his mother, who had lost her memory and her grip on life. My mother was suffering the same trials at that point, and I totally empathized. That collection also included The Lady in the Van (later a brilliant film starring Maggie Smith). But, more generally, I appreciated the way Bennett's powers of observation extended also to himself; he seemed able to be completely honest with himself in a way that wasn't self-critical or self-justifying, but just limpid and detached and courageous. And again the thing about nostalgia comes up: "I listen," he writes, "to the ceremony [for Armistice Day] on the radio, and as I type this I hear the guns rumbling across the park for the start of the Two Minutes' Silence. I find the ceremony ridiculous and hypocritical, and yet it brings a lump to my throat. Why?" That exactly expresses the conundrum...

Moving on a bit further still, to 2006, when I was once more mired in pedagogy, I enjoyed the film of The History Boys, which uses the setting of a school to examine themes of education, history, class and national identity.

So, much as I've appreciated The Uncommon Reader per se, possibly its most important contribution is to remind me of a writer I really should check back in with.