The Queen Elizabeth Book Club

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The New York Sun

Many lovers of literature, regardless of their politics, were no doubt astonished by President George W. Bush’s assertion, in Robert Draper’s new biography, “Dead Certain,” that he has already read no less than 87 books this year. (In 2005, it was reported, creepily enough, that he enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s college-sex novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”) The question must be asked: What effect might literature, generally aspiring to nuance, have had on a political leader whose way of viewing the world usually comes in declarative black and white?

Alan Bennett, the celebrated English author of the play “The History Boys,” explores the British analog to this conundrum in his breezy new novella, “The Uncommon Reader.” The conceit: Queen Elizabeth II becomes a bookworm.

The premise may not seem so preposterous at first, but Mr. Bennett supposes that Her Majesty, being the ultimate public figure, may consequently lead a paltry aesthetic life. “Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself,” he writes. One day, while walking her dogs on the palace grounds, the queen happens upon a mobile library parked outside the royal kitchens. Not wanting to seem impolite, she borrows a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett (“I made her a dame,” she recalls) and gives it a skim. One book leads to another, and soon enough she is consuming every book in sight, employing Norman, a young kitchen worker whose literary tastes lean toward whichever authors are gay, as her amanuensis. All this sets off a wave of consternation among her staff — particularly her rigid private secretary, Sir Kevin, who believes that her penchant for books “sends the wrong message.”

Nevertheless, the queen keeps her royal nose pressed firmly within the pages of the Western canon, and before long she is sailing through Proust and Dostoevsky. As a result, she comes to see her life for what it truly is: a hollow pageant of ceremonial obligation, devoid of meaning. Slowly, she finds that reading enhances her capacity for empathy and observation, and she even begins to keep a notebook, discovering that she possesses an authorial voice all her own.

Mr. Bennett delivers this enticing turn of events in a reliably pithy style, but the scenario begins to lose steam well before the novella’s 120 pages are through. The book is neither outrageous nor subversive enough to succeed fully as satire, and at the same time lacks the shading of “The History Boys,” whose central principle — knowledge for knowledge’s sake — was rendered with a trace of melancholy and moral ambivalence. At times, it falls back on trite endorsements of the written word: “A book is a device to ignite the imagination,” the queen declares — hardly a case that needs to be made with Mr. Bennett’s readers.

The book enters more complicated territory when it considers the solitary perspective the queen would have as a reader. At first, she cannot grasp the “minute social distinctions” that characterize Jane Austen’s novels, because she inhabits a social sphere of her own, viewing society from an impossibly high perch, much like the moon contemplating the ecology of the oceans. And she must struggle with the question of whether reading holds up against firsthand experience. After all, she’s traveled the globe, held court with world leaders — what could she possibly have to gain from a book? As it turns out, literature offers her what her subjects never have: a level playing field. “The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: There was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included.”

Occasionally, Mr. Bennett does hit a welcome satirical note. In one of the novella’s more cutting scenes, the newly book-obsessed queen invites her favorite authors (who go unnamed) to a reception at the palace. She is unimpressed. “Shy and even timid though authors had generally seemed to be when she had met them individually, taken together they were loud, gossipy and, though they laughed a good deal, not, so far as she could tell, particularly funny.”

Though “The Uncommon Reader” is dotted with a few sharp-edged moments such as this, it functions mostly as a lighthearted thought experiment. Unlike Peter Morgan’s film “The Queen,” it never creates a sense of inhabiting the monarch’s private psyche. Rather, Mr. Bennett implies, a private psyche is the only luxury she has never had — that is, until she develops one, courtesy of the London Library. But Mr. Bennett has trouble dramatizing the consequences of her transformation. Reading is a quintessentially private act, no matter how influential the hand turning the pages. Its salutary effects, when they exist at all, can be infinitesimal, even unconscious. Evidence suggests that literature doesn’t provoke earth-shifting change or bring sudden enlightenment to heads of state. It may be that the bookshelves of the powerful tell us astonishingly little about the way they wield their power.

Mr. Schulman is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.


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