The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Forget The Crown – meet the real King
Robert Hardman’s magisterial biography, full of detail about Charles III, the Queen and the Sussexes, makes other royal books look like gossipy flim-flam. This one will become a key historical document
464pp, Macmillan, T £18.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £22, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
When one reads something by a person termed a “royal expert” or “royal insider”, one normally expects to be served 80 per cent speculation by someone the Princess Royal once told to “naff off ”. This is not so with Robert Hardman. For a quarter of a century, he has earned the respect of the Royal family and their household by telling the truth, exercising discretion, avoiding sensationalism and acquiring a deep understanding of the institution and its history. His books and television programmes on the functioning of our monarchy are therefore highly authoritative and laden with insight, and this latest, Charles III, is no exception.
Hardman never over-sells himself or his work. He has no need to: its sheer quality speaks for itself. Beginning this book on our King, the author says that “I have not sought to write a full-life biography. This is a contemporary portrait of our new monarch, and his new court.” And he proceeds to do exactly that, in Rolls-Royce fashion. He has on-the-record interviews with, among others, the Princess Royal and Annabel Elliot, our new Queen’s sister; other friends and staff of the King and Queen have spoken to him extensively, but privately.
The trust these people put in Hardman did not just secure him access to superb interviewees, but also allowed him to go behind the scenes in royal palaces and houses, to get close to “Operation London Bridge” – seeing the late Queen’s funeral in detail hitherto denied to the rest of us – and to be at some rehearsals for the Coronation. Hardman’s encyclopaedic knowledge of events and personalities at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, and of the key moments in the transition in his subject’s life from Prince of Wales to King, means he can spot the difference between a rumour and a cast-iron fact at about 5,000 yards. He is never a sycophant, and is always scrupulously fair. As a situation report on the monarchy today, this book will attain the status of a historical document.
Our King does not make himself accessible to the point where to use Bagehot’s phrase, he “lets daylight in upon the magic”, but he takes a generationally different attitude to the operation of what his late father called “the Firm”. Some time-honoured necessities of royal life, such as the stony silence when asked repeatedly by tabloids to comment on sensationalist matters, are sensibly maintained, but deep engagement with people such as the beneficiaries of the Prince’s Trust, or those who share the King’s interests in architecture, trees or classical music, contrasts with Queen Elizabeth II’s more remote style.
Hardman emphasises that the King knows the constitutional boundaries, yet this book makes no pretence that personal interests have been consigned to the past. Our Sovereign remains deeply invested in Poundbury, his humane housing development in Dorset, while his decision to appoint himself Ranger of Windsor Great Park has redoubled his interest in the natural landscape.
It is precisely because Hardman is so restrained in expressing his own feelings that when he lets something slip – such as about the relentless search for grievances by the Duke of Sussex and his wife – it carries extraordinary weight. On the day of the late Queen’s death, Hardman writes, the Duke took umbrage that he and the Duchess were not invited to share the Duke of Cambridge’s plane to Scotland: “Had the Sussexes been keen to share a flight, they could have asked their staff to contact Prince William’s staff. ‘They had all the numbers,’ says a senior Kensington Palace aide, who is adamant there was no call from the Sussexes’ camp that morning.” Hardman adds that “the Sussexes’ capacity for taking offence was well known”.
Hardman also sets out the practical problems that the King faces with managing his brother, the Duke of York. “There will be no eviction order from the King,” writes Hardman about the Duke’s tenure of Royal Lodge. “It will depend on whether the Duke can pay the separate security bill, estimated to be around £1m a year. With no public duties to justify this from public expenditure… the Duke may find it makes more sense to move to much cheaper accommodation inside the Windsor security cordon.” Recent revelations from the Epstein case may, since the book went to press, have complicated matters further. Hardman does not seek to pretend that many in the royal household did not find the Duke utterly disagreeable, or that many tears have been shed after his downfall.
The star of Charles III is the Queen. Hardman quotes the Princess Royal as saying that “her understanding of her role and how much difference it makes to the King has been absolutely outstanding”. Hardman himself is clearly a fan, and justifiably so: he illustrates repeatedly how the Queen has made the King a happier, more serene and better monarch than he might otherwise have been. The overall message of this first-class book, in fact, is that the long-held expectations for this new reign have, almost always, been wildly exceeded – to the point where even the garbage that is Netflix’s The Crown can do it no damage.
We learn that ‘the Sussexes’ capacity for taking offence was well known’
At the time, McGhee was contending with another burden. Early in the pandemic, her mother had died unexpectedly and in plenty of debt, commitments for which McGhee was, in the midst of her grief, responsible – or so the people harassing her day and night told her. How do I know all this? She wrote a piece about her predicament, and that of so many others, in a trenchant Paris Review piece titled “America’s Dead Souls”.
These experiences, and Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 masterpiece of (almost) that title, all inform McGhee’s striking debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, dedicated “to the forgotten who have been worked to death”. Her hapless protagonist is unemployed, in debt, confined to a dank basement room beneath his landlord’s house. His life is stalled and hopeless, but Abernathy “desperately desires to be good”, so when opportunity knocks, he’s dead keen. A mysterious government agency offers debt forgiveness in return for unusual, yet surely interesting, work: he is to be a “dream auditor”, entering the night-time worlds of white-collar workers, and expunging elements of anxiety or distress so that they might be more productive for their masters.
In Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a one-time civil servant, makes a picaresque journey around Russia, “buying” dead serfs. Landowners were forced to pay tax on these workers – who were a step up from being enslaved, to put it kindly – if they hadn’t yet been removed from the census rolls. Chichikov’s work relieves them of this taxative burden; but his intention, as McGhee puts it in her Paris Review essay, is to mortgage their souls for profit – and this is precisely the theme she explores in Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind.
Its title springs from the desperate reassurances that 26-year-old Abernathy offers himself in moments of doubt. He is competent, he is well respected by his community: he must believe in himself. He enters the surreal landscape of other people’s nighttime odysseys (armed with a kind of vacuum cleaner to “package” up unwanted imagery), guided by Kai, a manager with bright green eyeglasses and bottle-red hair – and he begins to scent prosperity, a rise up the corporate ladder of the Dream Archive. Meanwhile, he falls into what seems like a promising relationship with his next-door neighbour, Rhoda, who’s a decade older than him, a single mother with a little girl to raise. The book’s denouement is unexpected, and quietly heartbreaking.
If the novel’s shifts between waking and sleeping worlds are sometimes elusive, this is intentional: who doesn’t know what it’s like to have work take over their every moment? McGhee’s writing is smart, slippery, angry, a compelling satire on the American culture now sold round the world as – well, a dream. “Jonathan Abernathy resolves to think of this work like so: he will try his best to use it without letting it use him. Like every American, he believes this is feasible, and like every American, he is wrong.” Molly McGhee has taken the matter of her life and used it with rich inventiveness: a rare and fine achievement.
‘Like every American, he thinks he can use work without it using him. He is wrong’