If the blandness of her public utterances, or phatic questions to those who have come to be ennobled by her ("have you come far?" and so on Bennett has commoners freaked out when she starts asking them what they've read lately instead) can exasperate, one can expect nothing more from a figurehead, whose expression must remain the same whatever the weather.
"She ain't no human being," as John Lydon correctly observed in 1977 she's a constitutional construct. The mistake, of course, is to see Elizabeth "Windsor" as a person. Look at poor Andrew Marr's The Diamond Queen, for instance. This is the most polite way imaginable of accusing the Queen of being out of touch but then, as Bennett observes, commoners too lose their minds when summoned to the presence.
Bennett illuminatingly imagines the Queen being at first daunted by Jane Austen: so far distant in terms of rank, she is unable to appreciate the – to her – relatively small social divisions between Austen's characters. There are two good reasons for its abolition: it infantilises us, and, in turn, it deranges the royals. But he is subversively sound, I think, on the nature of the monarchy. Her courtiers hate the habit they perceive – hilariously – that reading is "elitist", and suspect incipient dementia.īennett's jokes are so beautifully modulated that I would rather not spoil them. and with the help of Norman, the autodidact gay kitchen porter, becomes an avid reader, eventually reading Proust at Balmoral instead of shooting stags. Noblesse oblige and all that, so she borrows a book – Ivy Compton-Burnett – and then, despite its being a slog, she borrows another ( Nancy Mitford – more to her taste) and another. The plot, for those unfamiliar with it: the Queen, herding unruly corgis, discovers a mobile library parked by the Buck House kitchens. If there is only going to be one good thing to come out of the jubilee, let it be this. It was first published in 2006 in the LRB, and released as a hardback in 2007. L et this column – a republican, ever since the usurpation of the enlightened elective monarchy of the Anglo-Saxons by those thugs, the Normans – at least join in the jamboree by celebrating the timely reprint of this little gem.
0 kommentar(er)
