Books I Suggest: Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader (2007)

             Here, as in Bennett’s play, A Question of Attribution (where Queen Elizabeth spars verbally with her art advisor, Anthony Blunt, whom she knows perfectly well is a spy), the reader can be confident that Bennett knows from up close the queen’s attitudes, manner of speaking, and daily round. The premise of The Uncommon Reader is that in her seventies, the queen begins to read seriously, and it changes her, first in small ways and then in quite a big one.

            Aside from Bennett’s ease with the details of the royal household and person, he gives us here a view of her intelligence and humor. Bennett’s style is clear and without mannerisms, a mixed style in which the vocabulary ranges from the professorial to slang from the gay world (dolly=pretty), from the military (“yomping” is Royal Marine slang for long distance marching with a full kit), to cricket (being “bowled a googly” is the equivalent of being thrown a curve), and just plain slang (duff=useless trash).

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954)

     Ebin Willoweed is one of the changed, coming out of his gormless thrall to his truly terrible, tyrant mother—she’s the most striking character portrayed in the book—to resume his writing career. What prompts the change is a tragedy in his Warwickshire village: the miller drowns himself, the butcher slits his throat, the baker drinks carbolic acid, and dozens die painfully. The villagers react like the torch-carrying mob in Frankenstein, marching to the house of an innocent man, with nasty results. 
    The already interesting Willoweeds, including the pretty second daughter Hattie, who’s obviously the child of a black father, become more interesting under the pressure of the gruesome plague that grips the village. Emma, the eldest Willoweed child, imagines a romantic young man who courts her—and finds him. All of this Barbara Comyns presents as if were the most common thing in the world. We laugh in places, even as the villagers drop. We are not prepared for it to end so quickly—the book is only about a hundred twenty pages—or so happily. Also, we like it.