The Uncommon Reader: Reading Royally
One of the lucky discoveries this year has been reading books about books. It’s an expansive genre (sub-genre?), occupying both the fictional and non-fictional ends of the genre-spectrum. I have previously written about its non-fiction end as laid out in Jorge Carrión’s Bookshops. Today I turn to the other end, with Alan Bennett’s 2007 novella, The Uncommon Reader.
Appearing first in the London Review of Books, The Uncommon Reader tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II and her discovery of reading. When her corgis disappear into the Buckingham Palace’s gardens, the Queen goes to look for them herself and happens upon the City of Westminster’s travelling library: a van that comes every Wednesday. After a polite conversation with the driver-slash-librarian, she borrows a book out of courtesy. Next week, she returns to the library, and borrows another one this time. And just like that, what starts as a gesture of courtesy soon turns into an unlikely friendship between the library driver, the Queen, and Norman – a kitchen boy from the palace, and the only other person present in the library on both occasions. In the beginning, the Queen is guided primarily by Norman’s reading choices (determined predominantly by whether the author is gay or not), her conversations with the boy enabled by his promotion from the kitchen staff to her attendant staff. However, she soon makes the transition to picking her own books, finding “how one book led to another”, and how “doors kept opening wherever she turned”.
As the Queen digs deeper into her newfound hobby, we see the royal household and the Cabinet being increasingly flustered and struggling to keep up with this sudden change. Itineraries and protocols find themselves changing to make room for the oddities that this hobby brings to the job. Her conversations with people move from scripted lines of inquiry – distance travelled, place of origin, profession – to unplanned (and occasionally long) conversations about what one is reading and about favourite authors. Her involvement and interest in ceremonies dips, with Cabinet lunches, state banquets, speeches, and inaugural functions turning into interruptions at best and irritants at worst. Meetings are rescheduled, delayed, and on occasion, missed. Instead, her interest travels to other, hitherto untouched activities: in Norfolk, she visits a primary school and reads out stories to the children; after a tree-planting drive, she recites a poem; she reads out passages at her Parliamentary addresses; she takes to sending books to the Prime Minister, and finally to reading Proust at Balmoral, bringing to an end the long-standing royal hobby of shooting stags.
Through the Queen’s eyes, we see not only what it’s like to fall in love with reading, but also feel the all-too-familiar sadness at never having the time to read all that we wish to – at the days simply not being long enough. This is accompanied with the unshakeable faith (and possibly, regret) that you’re not reading as much as you’re supposed to. There is also the regret that the Queen feels at having arrived at reading all too late, at having a daunting amount of reading to catch up with, at having spent years never being interested in reading, and most of all, at having met a fair share of authors without ever knowing what to say to them.
“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. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
Underlying this regret and thrill is also a newfound sense of humility. The appeal of reading lies in its utter indifference to the personal identity of the reader. She becomes just like any other reader. Reading is, for the Queen, a means of being privy to lives radically different from hers: common lives, working lives, the sort she has simply never had the potential to imagine. In reading, the Queen, who has always led a life apart from the crowd, finds ways to share the crowd. In reading, she finds anonymity, and in that anonymity, a shared and common love. In reading, she finds herself humbled, more aware of lives outside her own. The more she reads, the more she finds herself sensitive to and considerate of the lives of her ladies-in-waiting and equerries, not to mention more aware of her sequestered existence.
The Uncommon Reader is not the first (or the last) book written about the importance of reading. We could fill multiple rooms with stories of reading changing lives. What is remarkable about The Uncommon Reader is its delivery: The Queen is, after all, a highly uncommon reader. Her life hasn’t been one that encouraged exploring libraries and bookshops, nor has it been one that has enabled honest and meaningful connections with people who are not royalty. Her job is not one that allows hobbies, leisure, or pleasure, and certainly not activities as ‘solipsistic’ (to borrow a word used by her very disgruntled Private Secretary) as reading. In choosing a protagonist as differently and unusually placed as the Queen, we have the set-up for what promises to be an unforgettable story. Bennett is able to paint a picture of reading both as a hobby and as something essential. The Queen changes through her reading in ways she can’t quite explain – or for that matter, identify – and Bennett does a wonderful job of peppering the novella with clues and hints of these changes, both big ones and small ones. The climax, although unexpected, is elegantly set up, even more elegantly executed and, in hindsight, truly fitting. Filled with humour, poignancy, and poetry, as well as observations on memory and legacy, The Uncommon Reader never loses its heart, remaining all along the story of the Queen’s literary journey while also maintaining its standing as a book about books. All in the space of only fifty-two pages.
Buy The Uncommon Reader here