Tag Archives: The Uncommon Reader

Preference for Fictional Fiction

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In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don’t have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana’s death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana’s mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It’s a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella’s plot was imagined and the film’s was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It’s handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.
I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth’s reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?

Factious Fiction: Alan Bennet’s The Uncommon Reader

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Perhaps you know the term ‘factious’? No? A blank slate are we? Then memorize the second italized definition, for that is the one that will be useful in this book review.

fac·tious (fak′s̸həs): adjective. 1. producing or tending to
produce faction; causing dissension 2. adding facts to fictious
stories or things, characterized by the misplacement of
fact

Alan Bennet’s new novella, The Uncommon Reader, is a light read about a dutiful Queen, a most pratical and attentive Queen, who takes to reading, of all things. Her servants put it down to dottiness, as at a ripe old age she begins thinking, noticing people, and reconsidering her duties and life.

The term factious is handy here, because Alan Bennet seems to be writing an imaginary fable about the joys of reading and self-discovery, except its about the real Queen of England with oodles of corgis and Diana’s death thrown in. A peculiar mix of fact and fiction, that is to say, factious. The dramatization of living people with stories that have nothing to do with them strikes me as a little odd, as if the Queen was a bird that wanted stuffing, if I may be so factious as to say so.

The Queen’s tone determines the whole novella, as it should since its her point-of-view, but it’s a pity her tone happens to be plain, uninsightful, and purely functional. Only at the end does the Queen take on some elegance and humor in her speech, and one gleans its a function of her reading. Novella-sized is the perfect length for its easily digestable but not inspiring tale. Amid teas and prime ministers and rain, it lacked only one British thing: that wicked sense of humor.

However, this homage to the written word did have its fun plot elements, such as the gay kitchen boy, and a neat ending, and its a pleasure to find something a little bit different on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. One also found the use of the impersonal royal tone never failed to please. Alan Bennet is a succesful author, whose most recent play is the The History Boys currently on Broadway. No doubt this little red book will find its way into many stockings come Christmas.