A postmodern delight to anyone with just a tiny passion for reading, Alan Bennett's novella is a whopping 143 pages and boasts some real belly laughs. .............................It opens with Corgis. The Queen of England's dogs have escaped in to a traveling library on the far side of the palace. Trying to restore order and maintain dignity, the Queen feels it her duty to "take an interest" in her subjects' hobbies and borrows a book.
An autodidact at seventy years old, the Queen returns every Wednesday to borrow anything from Austen to Henry James. Within weeks, her butler, driver, and maids are deeply concerned with Her Majesty's new "interest" that they attempt to distract her, hide the books, set them on fire, anything--because the Queen has essentially lost interest in being the Queen.
Constructed as a reader and a human being in the company of Cordelia and Thoreau, the Queen realizes that her life as monarch of the United Kingdom has been a complete wash. And on her eightieth birthday, she abdicates the throne to become a writer.
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The title is a marvelous play on words, and a telling insight into the nature of postmodern fiction. The Queen, clearly royal and not a commoner in any way, is different from any other reader. Leaving the predictable bemoaned masses of poor library-mongers and cafe napkin-writers, Bennett jumps to the margins and chooses for his protagonist Her Majesty, Queen of England. Her servants and advisors do not like her reading one bit. It is changing her too quickly--making her, dare they say, common?
The book asks some stern questions of us: How has our reading constructed us? Who are we? What is really important? Is reading all that important, and if so, why? Why write about life, the world, humanity, reading, ourselves, the others? Did she do the right thing in the end? Would we, given the same circumstance? Why?
Bennett is a treat to read. In simple, British prose, he ties real people, events, and artists together to make us wonder and believe at once. Essential reading for anyone with an itch for the literary.
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