The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Alan Bennett
Language: English
Pages: 120
ISBN: 0312427646
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From one of England's most celebrated writers, the author of the award-winning The History Boys, a funny and superbly observed novella about the Queen of England and the subversive power of reading
When her corgis stray into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, the Queen feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Discovering the joy of reading widely (from J. R. Ackerley, Jean Genet, and Ivy Compton-Burnett to the classics) and intelligently, she finds that her view of the world changes dramatically. Abetted in her newfound obsession by Norman, a young man from the royal kitchens, the Queen comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with the routines of her role as monarch. Her new passion for reading initially alarms the palace staff and soon leads to surprising and very funny consequences for the country at large.
a unique position.’ ‘I seldom forget it,’ said the Queen. ‘Go on.’ ‘The monarch has, I think I’m right in saying, never published a book.’ The Queen shook her finger at him, a gesture she remembered in the moment of making it that was a mannerism of Noël Coward’s. ‘That isn’t quite true, Prime Minister. My ancestor Henry VIII, for instance, wrote a book. Against heresy. That is why one is still called Defender of the Faith. So, too, did my namesake Elizabeth I.’ The prime minister was about
to protest. ‘No, one knows it isn’t the same, but my great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also, Leaves from a Highland Journal, and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offence as to be almost unreadable. It’s not a model one would want to follow. And then of course’ – and the Queen looked hard at her first minister – ‘there was my uncle the Duke of Windsor. He wrote a book, A King’s Story, the history of his marriage and subsequent adventures. If nothing else,
as one of the authors and performers of the revue Beyond the Fringe. His stage plays include Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country and The Lady in the Van, and he has written many television plays, notably A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Woman of No Importance and the series of monologues Talking Heads. An adaptation of his television play, An Englishman Abroad, was paired with A Question of Attributionin the double-bill Single Spies, first produced at the National
helped. Which was all very well, except it was only when she was actually in the coach, with the procession drawn up in the palace forecourt and ready for the off, that, as she put on her glasses, she realised she’d forgotten the book. And while the duke fumes in the corner and the postillions fidget, the horses shift and the harness clinks, Norman is rung on the mobile. The Guardsmen stand at ease and the procession waits. The officer in charge looks at his watch. Two minutes late. Knowing
Westminster she popped the offending book behind a cushion in the carriage ready for the journey back, mindful as she sat on the throne and embarked on her speech of how tedious was the twaddle she was called on to deliver and that this was actually the only occasion when she got to read aloud to the nation. ‘My government will do this … my government will do that.’ It was so barbarously phrased and wholly devoid of style or interest that she felt it demeaned the very act of reading itself, with