This October, author Alan Bennett announced that he planned to donate all of his written archives, diaries and books to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Bennett told the press he was acting out of gratitude for his education at Oxford's Exeter College, for which he received a full scholarship.
It makes perfect sense that a man who holds the ideal of promoting literacy in such high regard would write a treatise on the transformative power of reading, as Bennett has done in his new novella, "The Uncommon Reader" (2008).
Bennett is best known in the United States as the playwright who gave us "The History Boys" (2005), and "The Madness of King George" (1991), both of which earned critical acclaim and went on to be reproduced on the big screen. Judging from "The Uncommon Reader," it is no coincidence that the public knows him best for these plays; even when writing prose, Bennett relies heavily on dialogue, often to the detriment of his character development.
The novella centers around a presumably fictional queen who is later revealed to be H.R.H. Elizabeth II. In the opening scene, Elizabeth wanders from her palace to a traveling library, driven by a Mr. Hutchings, that is passing through Westminster.
While there, Elizabeth meets a palace kitchen worker, Norman Seakins, and soon learns, much to her embarrasment, that Seakins is a far more accomplished reader than her.
The queen thus promotes Seakins to be her literary consultant and companion. Soon the two are inseparable, and the queen begins to read during her unscheduled time. No one else in her coterie but Seakins understands the importance of books, and this soon becomes a problem when Seakins clashes with the queen's private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, a New Zealand-born Harvard Business graduate on a mission to make royals more "accessible." The hypocritical Scatchad fears that the queen's habit of reading will seem elitist, and, if publicized, will alienate most of her subjects. The queen, however, believes herself to be the only "true democrat in the country."
While the queen is away on a brief trip to Canada, Scatchard dismisses Seakins by sending him off to college, leaving the queen powerless against Scatchard's mandates of decorum.
Even after Seakin's departure, however, Elizabeth reads avidly and advertises her new habit, much to the chagrin of her personnel. She begins to ask everyone she meets what they are reading, and even starts to neglect her personal appearance in order to spend more time with her books. Scatchard continues to try to control the Queen's new addiction, but she cannot be stopped.
Right to its surprising conclusion, the novella tells a charming story, full of the kind of imaginative details about daily life as a queen that have long attracted readers and audiences to tales of royalty, such as "Roman Holiday" or "The Princess Diaries."
While in Bennett's dramatic endeavors such details might provide enough color to mask shallow characters, however, the same is not the case in "The Uncommon Reader."
Seakins is the token butler figure -- simple, but wise and endearing -- and the dotty Sir Claude and snobby Sir Kevin fall into stock categories just as easily. The only exception is the queen herself, but it's a shame that Bennett tells, rather than shows, us how she changes, using straightforward, obvious dialogue as his primary means of characterization.
All too often, Her Majesty issues banal dicta on the value of reading, all of which are true and important to impart. But it appears Bennett is preaching to the choir.
