The Uncommon Reader is short and sweet, charming and funny. I feel like every book blogger other than me read this one years ago, so you probably already know the premise, but if you don’t, here it is: the Queen of England (yes, the current one) happens upon a mobile library parked outside Buckingham Palace. She steps in to apologize for her yapping corgis (chasing after them is what brought her to this corner of the grounds to begin with) but then feels obligated to take out a book, because it’d be rude for her not to, perhaps particularly because the library has only one other patron present (a kitchen boy called Norman). She grabs an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, because the name at least is familiar (“I made her a dame,” she says, as she checks the book out), and, having checked it out, feels obligated to read the whole thing (8). “Once I start a book I finish it,” she says. “That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato — one finishes what’s on one’s plate” (11). She’s planning to send a servant to return the book the following week, but finds herself wanting to escape a meeting with her private secretary, so ends up returning it herself. Norman’s at the library again, and now that the Queen’s there again too, surely she should check out another book? This time she grabs a novel by Nancy Mitford (another name she recognizes), and turns out to quite like it.
And so the Queen becomes a reader, moving from Mitford to Anita Brookner to Ian McEwan to A.S. Byatt to Dickens to Proust to Pepys. She eventually even re-reads—and enjoys—that first Ivy Compton-Burnett. She promotes Norman from the kitchens to be her helper in all things bookish, and finds that reading is occupying rather more of her time and her thoughts than anyone would have expected. The Queen’s newfound delight in books causes much consternation among everyone from her private secretary to the prime minister to the palace servants. She’s always reading! She reads when she’s being driven from one place to another! (She still waves to the public from the window: she just keeps her book low enough so it can’t be seen.) She even starts writing things down—surely not how a monarch ought to be spending her time? Part of what’s pleasing about this book is how it articulates the pleasures of reading, but also the ways in which it contrasts to other ways of learning about things—like in the following passage where the Queen tells her private secretary she wished she’d read more by poets like Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes before she met them:
‘But ma’am must have been briefed, surely?’
‘Of course,’ said the Queen, ‘but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up’ (21-22)
By becoming a reader, the Queen learns about reading: she learns “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” (21). She learns how to be a reader, moving to increasingly complex works of fiction and noticing authors’ voices and how one writer’s voice is different from another’s. But she learns more than that, too: she starts noticing details, particularly details of people: how they look and how they move and how they speak, to start, but also how they feel, or how they might feel. Reading, though it alienates the advisors and equerries who surround the Queen, brings her increasingly in touch with humanity, and with herself. If that makes this book sound overly didactic, or overly twee, fear not: it’s short and fun enough not to feel heavy-handed, though sometimes it does plod a little—there were passages I thought would work better as speeches in a movie or play than in a novella. But when Bennett does shorter snippets of dialogue, it’s often hilarious, as in this passage, which made me laugh out loud: the Queen has been urging the prime minister to read particular books that might help him to be informed about the history of places like Israel or Iran, and the prime minister is not pleased. He’s so not pleased, in fact, that he has his special adviser call the Queen’s private secretary, thus:
Eventually Sir Kevin got a call from the special adviser.
‘Your employer has been giving my employer a hard time.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order.’
‘Her Majesty likes reading.’
‘I like having my dick sucked. I don’t make the prime minister do it. Any thoughts, Kevin?
‘I will speak to Her Majesty.’
‘You do that, Kev. And tell her to knock it off.’ (86)
There, that saves it from being twee, right?
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