The British author and satirist Craig Brown deserves credit for inventing a new style of royal biography in 2017 with his irresistibly readable Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. (In his native country, it had the superior title Ma’am Darling.) This new genre, which might be called pointilliste biography, took its subject and, through a series of short, at times oblique essays and sketches, painted a picture that was far more revealing and humorous than a conventional cradle-to-grave life would have been.
It worked superbly in Ninety-Nine Glimpses and may have been even better executed in its follow-up, 2020’s 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, in which Brown delved into the personal and professional lives of the Fab Four with a mixture of authority and personal bias that amused as much as it enthralled. (He is a fully committed admirer of McCartney, although not without the ability to poke fun at him; he loathes Yoko Ono and does a fine job of unpicking her pretension and falsehoods.) Now, he has taken on his most expansive subject yet, in the form of HRH Queen Elizabeth II: Britain’s longest-serving monarch, a woman who is widely regarded as the greatest ruler ever to serve on the throne and a much-missed figure. He follows in the footsteps of countless royal biographers, from Ben Pimlott to Sally Bedell Smith, with the selling points of innovative structure and authorial irreverence. But how does it hold up?
Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, at a leisurely 662 pages, is more a book to be dipped into than read cover to cover. Brown is faced with a problem from the outset that his earlier books did not possess, namely that Elizabeth II is not, in herself, an especially interesting figure. A recurrent motif is that otherwise hardy and sane people were, when introduced to her, reduced to knock-kneed caricatures of terror; the novelist Kingsley Amis was so frightened of an inadvertent bowel movement in her presence that, in the words of his son Martin, he “had his doctor lay down a firewall of Imodium, and there was some doubt, afterwards, whether he would ever again go to the toilet.” Yet this was less because of the presence of a slight, elegant woman but more because of the import of majesty that she conveyed. (Full disclosure: I never met the late queen, although I was briefly in her presence once in Windsor, but I did meet her eldest son, who struck me as a thoroughly amiable type and with whom I had a brief conversation about poetry.)
It is this tension between the woman—brisk, fond of horses, corgis, and occasionally her children and husband—and the role that she assumed at the age of 25, following the premature death of her father King George VI, that makes Elizabeth II an interesting figure. Yet she herself remains largely a blank. Two years after her death, there has been no officially sanctioned biography that Brown can draw on, and her private letters and diary have not been rationed out to some accomplished (and presumably pliant) writer so that her public might have an insight into her thoughts and feelings as to what took place over her 70-year reign. In their absence, Brown, like countless other journalists, has to look in from the outside, drawing on a vast number of other sources in order to construct a comprehensive picture of the monarch.
To my surprise, the first half of Q often drags. Lighter on laughs than you might expect from Brown, it is rich in anecdote and detail, but, at times, I wondered whether the red pencil of an editor might have been useful. Chapter 25, detailing the run-up to the coronation and the events of the day in a series of vignettes and observations, is engagingly written and a testament to Brown’s considerable research. It is also 35 pages long and palls after around 20. This book could have come in at 400 pages and been none the worse for it. The reader finishes and is entertained and amused, but there is no great insight into the mind or character of Queen Elizabeth, who remains Sphinx-like throughout.
Still, many of the individual incidents and stories are splendidly evoked and unfamiliar enough to feel fresh. Brown often goes off piste to bring in other members of the royal family, and Prince Philip’s curt, often blunt personality provides many of the laughs in the early stretches of the book; we learn, for instance, that he subscribed to the Flying Saucer Review in the ’50s. And the great comic highlight comes later on when Brown describes, in graphic, hilarious detail, the shenanigans that occurred in the ill-fated It’s A Grand Knockout tournament in June 1987.
Better known as It’s A Royal Knockout, it took place at the behest of Prince Edward and featured him, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Sarah Ferguson as team captains, along with a bizarre assortment of celebrities, including Kevin Kline, George Lazenby, and Tom Jones, all grimly competing in medieval games for charity. The author calls himself “long a PhD student of the event,” and the uninitiated will find it hard to read his vivid account of the apparently endless failures of the day without howling with laughter. Several people on public transport were driven to ask me if I was alright, so hysterical was my reaction, and had I been able to reply with words, I could only have reassured them that my hilarity paled in comparison to the strangeness of that ill-conceived event.
This is no hagiography, but Brown’s presentation of the Queen as a dignified, no-nonsense character is persuasive and sympathetic. There is an intriguing story about the royal household’s poor treatment of the royal horse trainer Dick Hern, who was sacked after he broke his neck, and brusquely ordered out of his grace-and-favor lodging at West Ilsley, where he was a tenant, because he was surplus to requirements. It was one of the few instances—the death of Princess Diana, which Brown handles quietly and affectingly here, another—where Elizabeth II badly misjudged the public mood, but at least she was able to listen to wider opinion and respond to it, albeit with the slow and deliberate pace of an ocean liner reversing. The monarch was very much not for turning; the difficult relationship she enjoyed with her similarly rigid premier, Margaret Thatcher, makes for some of the book’s livelier passages.
Q: A Voyage Around the Queen may be gossipy rather than authoritative and a superior example of a cuttings job rather than genuinely revelatory, but it is, for the most part, something that royal biographies seldom are: fun, especially in its superior second half. The vignettes of social observation may be weighted toward the intelligentsia and the aristocracy, as it is their letters and diaries that have largely survived, but at least the examples that Brown chooses tend to be splendidly witty and waspish, making for endless diversion. And the book ends on a tease, too. As the late monarch is laid to rest and the crown passes to King Charles III, as he now is, it is all too easy to imagine Brown turning his keen—although never gratuitously unkind—eye and pen on the current king in the fullness of time. That would be a book very much worth reading.
Q: A Voyage Around the Queen
by Craig Brown
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 662 pp., $35
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty(St. Martin’s Press).
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