alan bennett the uncommon reader summary

This Christmas, put a copy in everyone's stocking. The Uncommon Reader, as everything Alan Bennett writes, is just perfect. You read Alan Bennett's one hundred and twenty-three little pages and it doesn't leave you wanting more it leaves you wondering how on earth you manage to struggle through everybody else's padded wafflings. The plot is a simple one, the language precise and elegant, the dialogue as perfectly-observed as ever. There are also single phrase definitions of all kinds - Proust for example should pull his socks up and the Queen feels Lauren Bacall got a better bite of the carrot. Of course, the narrative itself is a satire and there are delightfully spiteful and mocking caricatures of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell and various Palace flunkeys. Books don't discriminate, they are there for everyone, as the Queen discovers, Literature, she thought, was a commonwealth letters a republic. If the most famous, most elevated literary ignoramus in the country can be rejuvenated by books, then so can we all. And of course, in her Maj, he has the perfect cipher. In this gem of a short story-come-novella, Alan Bennett, a famous bookworm himself, talks about what it is to read the process, the feeling, the self-knowledge, the understanding of others, the clarification of hitherto unarticulated ideas. But her Majesty will not be beaten.įrom a reader, to a reader. They contrive ways to dissuade the monarch - they banish poor Norman to a creative writing course at East Anglia University and at one point, they even blow up poor Anita Brookner (well, her words, not her person) and claim they were foiling a terrorist attack. She starts to worry less about duty and more about reading, even hiding books under cushions on her way to the State Opening of Parliament. She devours it all, from Nancy Mitford, through Thomas Hardy, Jean Genet, John Betjeman and well, just about everyone. Guided at first by Norman, dubbed by ERII an amanuensis and by her consort a ginger stick-in-waiting, the Queen has a literary epiphany.

It's the start of something new for the Queen, whose horizons suddenly open. When she returns it, she strikes up a conversation with a kitchen assistant, the carrot-topped Norman, who recommends a Nancy Mitford. She chooses an Ivy Compton-Burnett and it turns out to be a rather duff read. Hot in pursuit, the Queen feels obliged to borrow a book to compensate for the pandemonium they cause.

One day, when the Westminster mobile library van makes its customary stop at Buckingham Palace, it is overrun by escaped corgis.

There is a sharp analysis of the reader and a powerful defence of reading. Summary: A more affectionate satire than you might expect, there are still some wonderful hatchet jobs together with the usual wonderful dialogue and multiple layers of jokes.

Alan bennett the uncommon reader summary