This superb novel captures the Queen better than a biography
It is the night before the Platinum Jubilee. The Queen is falling asleep, perhaps falling into the Big Sleep. “She was in that state between sleep and waking, between consciousness and a greater dark.” Her mind is filled with memories and visions – and it is AN Wilson’s contention, in this biographical novel, that Her Majesty is the same in her 90s as she was aged nine, “jigsaw-crazy, pony-mad, prayerful… a little cold”.
A formative moment was being with her grandfather, George V, who was recuperating “on the beach at Bognor”. Princess Elizabeth glimpsed her destiny, saw that one day, though she would inherit a crumbling England and a vanishing Empire, her task would be to represent “a simple no-nonsense world” of impeccable manners and religious observance, imbued with “a spirit of tolerance” and the “cultivation of simple, personal goodness”.
George V knew intuitively that his heir, the future Edward VIII, was “an absolute stinker”. As the Queen is made to say, though Uncle David was debonair and knew about “jazz bands and silk shirts and nightclubs”, the man had no bottom. He “had let them all down… Failed in his duty.”
One of the delights of Wilson’s novel (which revisits a subject he
covered in 1984, in an anonymously published book-length poem, also called Lilibet) is that, between the lines, a person’s real nature is revealed. George VI may well be a beloved papa, but he is also petty and tantrum-prone, “blowing his top” if ever he saw “a smudge on a footman’s button”.
The future Queen’s life is lonely, a seasonal trudge around Balmoral, Sandringham and Royal Lodge, Windsor. Apart from her father, with his “sad, nervous face”, and her mother, “giving off that reassuring combination of scent and gin”, there were only Crawfie and Bobo, the nanny and the dresser, for company. Plus, Princess Margaret – a peculiar anachronism, her voice and bearing belonging to a lost Edwardian epoch of country house weekends, meets, balls
and “dinners where everyone knew everyone and everyone was related”.
The sole occasion Her Majesty truly mingled with her people was in the war, when she drove a van around London in the blackout and fixed engines as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor, and for once could test her “capacities against others of her own age”. The chief hassle was putting up with Churchill, who was tight on brandy at 10 in the morning, and whose manner “always felt like playacting”.
When Prince Philip turns up, with his “sharp, clever face and piercing blue eyes”, Wilson captures the overbearingness, as well as the charm. Where the reader may think him pushy and unpleasant – men whose “mischief was all a joke” are often bullies – the Queen, of course, is enchanted. Having encountered her future husband at
Dartmouth, she experienced “a new sort of happiness. Her heart was dancing.” Elizabeth and Philip are in Malta for two years between 1949 and 1951, so – in Wilson’s devastating, throwaway line – “Charles was looked after perfectly happily” by nannies in England.
The stammering George VI’s chain-smoking catches up with him, advanced lung cancer is diagnosed, and Lilibet becomes monarch while up a fig tree in Africa. Philip, forced to leave the Navy, is not smitten with their new life – “cutting bloody tapes and ribbons and waving from the backs of cars”.
How much longer can the institution last? Wilson’s portrait is of a 1950s time-warp, the Court surviving only because it resists change – electric fires, “austere meals”, nostalgia for Jimmy Young on the radio and the crowds on VE Day. “There was the most extraordinary sense of collective happiness, euphoria, relief ”, which the Queen has not experienced since, except when licked by Dookie, Jane, Crackers, Carol, Susan, Honey, Shadow, Smokey, Clipper, Sparky, Whisky, Jolly, Socks, Piper and Tiny, the blinking corgis, who bite the Palace clock-winders and the equerries.
As Lilibet understood on Bognor beach, constitutional monarchy is “like the most exquisite piece of jewellery, held together by tiny golden chains”. Tittle-tattle, tabloid pestering, nasty books and documentaries, let alone Netflix’s The Crown, have done much harm – and Wilson, our supreme literary operator, is to be praised for this superb distillation, which is much more perceptive than the lumpy official biographies.