Posts tagged alan bennett

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett During a recent visit to a branch of my favorite bookstore chain, less than a week after I finished reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, I saw three or four copies of the book displayed in the memoir/biography section. I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. It wasn’t because there were too few or too many books on display, a perceived indication of how well or how badly the book is selling or is expected to sell. Rather, it was because the book, whose content originally appeared in the pages of the London Review of Books, is actually neither a memoir nor a biography. It is, for the record, a work of prose fiction. I couldn’t blame the bookstore staff for putting copies of the book in the wrong aisle, though. They could have placed The Uncommon Reader in a section dedicated to another category of nonfiction, and I still would have understood their mistake. After all, The Uncommon Reader is about a person that has been the subject of many a nonfiction book. That person is none other than Her Majesty The Queen. A quick and easy hundred-plus-page novella, The Uncommon Reader opens in medias res. Her Majesty, hosting a state dinner for the government of France, accosts the French president and asks him about his opinion on Jean Genet. But the president, having little to no knowledge about the French writer, can only respond to the Queen’s earnest interrogation with inward oligosyllables. “Bien sûr.” “Vraiment?” Then, a section break brings the reader to the real beginning of the story. It’s a Wednesday, and Her Majesty’s prized corgis are all wrought up, barking madly at something outside the Buckingham Palace. She comes out to investigate the noise and sees that the object of her pets’ hostile behavior is a van, the Westminster mobile library that stops by the palace every week. She approaches the vehicle, apologizes to the driver-cum-librarian, and lest she be thought of as ill-mannered, asks if she may borrow a book. She returns to the palace clutching a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and although a week later it proves to be a less than satisfying book, she nonetheless feels obligated to get another one, preferably by a different author, from the traveling library. And then she gets another, and another… Her Majesty declares herself an opsimath, one who learns (or in her case, reads) late in life, and assigns Norman Seakins, a kitchen boy with a predilection for books (especially those written by the likes of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and the previously mentioned Genet, i.e., gay authors) as her amanuensis, her secretary in affairs relating to her casual reading. Her real private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, on the other hand, declares war against the Queen’s newfound obsession. He believes that her constant preoccupation is taking its toll on her sworn duties as head of the British monarchy, and he conspires with the equerries and servants to thwart the Queen’s bibliophilic pursuits. In one of the crusade’s numerous attempts—and doubtless one of the more memorable scenes in The Uncommon Reader—security confiscates a book that she leaves behind in the royal coach as she opens Parliament. “When they arrived at the palace, she had a word with […] the young footman in charge, who said […] security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’” She remains unencumbered, even by his beloved dogs, who seem to be in on the plot as well, growling at poor Norman every time they see him and chewing apart novels by Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt that are left unattended. Apart from creating a hilarious and entertaining book that culminates in a remarkable surprise ending after much poking fun at various protocols of monarchy and interesting facets of royal life by positing an alternate history where the sovereign becomes oblivious to her responsibilities to the public as she pursues the hobby of reading, Alan Bennett, who also wrote the Tony Award-winning The History Boys, may have come up with one of the finest books about books ever written. The Uncommon Reader is a short but rewarding book that speaks to all passionate readers from all walks of life. It stresses, among other things, the implications of embracing the apparent hypertextuality that arises between books when one submits to the unique pleasures of reading. Indeed, not since Italo Calvino’s superb If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has the line, “one book leads to another,” been made to ring so true. In The Uncommon Reader, after a rather disappointing experience with Compton-Burnett’s novel, the Queen selects Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love for her sophomore book. Mitford’s choice of title and engaging prose augur well for the Queen as she finds the book quite enjoyable. And being the first in a trilogy, it sets off a search for its sequels, which in turn leads to more similar quests to find, discover, and stumble upon the Queen’s next big read. Already The Uncommon Reader ceases to be solely a genuinely funny situation comedy and manifests itself as a portrait of the pursuit of literature, one that every common reader, that is, one who reads for pleasure as well as a reader without noble rank, can easily relate to and perhaps even consider as a prototype for one’s own memoir.

The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

During a recent visit to a branch of my favorite bookstore chain, less than a week after I finished reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, I saw three or four copies of the book displayed in the memoir/biography section. I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. It wasn’t because there were too few or too many books on display, a perceived indication of how well or how badly the book is selling or is expected to sell. Rather, it was because the book, whose content originally appeared in the pages of the London Review of Books, is actually neither a memoir nor a biography. It is, for the record, a work of prose fiction. I couldn’t blame the bookstore staff for putting copies of the book in the wrong aisle, though. They could have placed The Uncommon Reader in a section dedicated to another category of nonfiction, and I still would have understood their mistake. After all, The Uncommon Reader is about a person that has been the subject of many a nonfiction book. That person is none other than Her Majesty The Queen.

A quick and easy hundred-plus-page novella, The Uncommon Reader opens in medias res. Her Majesty, hosting a state dinner for the government of France, accosts the French president and asks him about his opinion on Jean Genet. But the president, having little to no knowledge about the French writer, can only respond to the Queen’s earnest interrogation with inward oligosyllables. “Bien sûr.” “Vraiment?”

Then, a section break brings the reader to the real beginning of the story. It’s a Wednesday, and Her Majesty’s prized corgis are all wrought up, barking madly at something outside the Buckingham Palace. She comes out to investigate the noise and sees that the object of her pets’ hostile behavior is a van, the Westminster mobile library that stops by the palace every week. She approaches the vehicle, apologizes to the driver-cum-librarian, and lest she be thought of as ill-mannered, asks if she may borrow a book. She returns to the palace clutching a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and although a week later it proves to be a less than satisfying book, she nonetheless feels obligated to get another one, preferably by a different author, from the traveling library. And then she gets another, and another…

Her Majesty declares herself an opsimath, one who learns (or in her case, reads) late in life, and assigns Norman Seakins, a kitchen boy with a predilection for books (especially those written by the likes of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and the previously mentioned Genet, i.e., gay authors) as her amanuensis, her secretary in affairs relating to her casual reading. Her real private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, on the other hand, declares war against the Queen’s newfound obsession. He believes that her constant preoccupation is taking its toll on her sworn duties as head of the British monarchy, and he conspires with the equerries and servants to thwart the Queen’s bibliophilic pursuits. In one of the crusade’s numerous attempts—and doubtless one of the more memorable scenes in The Uncommon Reader—security confiscates a book that she leaves behind in the royal coach as she opens Parliament.

“When they arrived at the palace, she had a word with […] the young footman in charge, who said […] security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’”

She remains unencumbered, even by his beloved dogs, who seem to be in on the plot as well, growling at poor Norman every time they see him and chewing apart novels by Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt that are left unattended.

Apart from creating a hilarious and entertaining book that culminates in a remarkable surprise ending after much poking fun at various protocols of monarchy and interesting facets of royal life by positing an alternate history where the sovereign becomes oblivious to her responsibilities to the public as she pursues the hobby of reading, Alan Bennett, who also wrote the Tony Award-winning The History Boys, may have come up with one of the finest books about books ever written. The Uncommon Reader is a short but rewarding book that speaks to all passionate readers from all walks of life. It stresses, among other things, the implications of embracing the apparent hypertextuality that arises between books when one submits to the unique pleasures of reading.

Indeed, not since Italo Calvino’s superb If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has the line, “one book leads to another,” been made to ring so true. In The Uncommon Reader, after a rather disappointing experience with Compton-Burnett’s novel, the Queen selects Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love for her sophomore book. Mitford’s choice of title and engaging prose augur well for the Queen as she finds the book quite enjoyable. And being the first in a trilogy, it sets off a search for its sequels, which in turn leads to more similar quests to find, discover, and stumble upon the Queen’s next big read. Already The Uncommon Reader ceases to be solely a genuinely funny situation comedy and manifests itself as a portrait of the pursuit of literature, one that every common reader, that is, one who reads for pleasure as well as a reader without noble rank, can easily relate to and perhaps even consider as a prototype for one’s own memoir.