''ALAN BENNETT GIVES US A NEW QUEEN SHE'S LIKE THE OLD ONE, BUT SHE READS A LOT''

Alan Bennett’s new book about Queen Elizabeth, "The Uncommon Reader" is published in America on September 18th, a fortnight after its appearance in Britain. Jasper Rees, in Intelligent Life magazine, declares himself amused ...

“The Uncommon Reader” posits a scenario ripe with comedy: that, as she enters her ninth decade, the Queen discovers the joys of reading. It is a tale of the unexpected. The joke, of course, is that the Queen’s taste for sedentary pleasures is widely believed to be confined to doing jigsaws and watching the racing. She is famously, for example, no fan of Shakespeare.

A reader on the throne is as implausible in its way as the plot of Sue Townsend’s 1992 novel, “The Queen and I”. Townsend, the creator of Adrian Mole, had huge fun transplanting the royal family, dethroned after the republicans take Downing Street, to a Midlands sink estate. Here they survive on welfare, without servants or other comforts. Although she does at one point shed a lone tear of despair as she stirs Baxter’s game soup at the hob, naturally the Queen faces the trials of working-class life with a resourcefulness which lends credence to the popular idea that she really could cut it in the real world. Unheated houses certainly wouldn’t trouble a woman rumoured to throw open the windows of Balmoral whatever the weather. The novel also became a popular play.

It wasn’t quite as popular as “The Queen”, the movie. Released a year ago, the film met with extraordinary success at the Oscars and the box office. Yes, Peter Morgan’s chronicle of the week leading up to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a made-up riff on the known course of events. But it answered a public yearning, which reached insurrectionary levels after Diana’s death, for a show of monarchical emotion. Unusually for a genre in which history is prey to the vagaries of speculation, there was notably little quibbling with the film’s deeper veracity. This was because Helen Mirren, created a Dame by Her Majesty not too long before she took on the role of impersonating her, carted home every award going for a performance which enraptured audiences into forgetting that they were watching just that. People saw the Queen briefly blubbing alone in a Scottish wilderness, and they fervently willed it to be true. In the literal sense, the film was make-believe.

The eponymous head of state seems to have found little to quarrel with in her portrayal, because Mirren and her director Stephen Frears were subsequently invited to lunch with their subject at Buckingham Palace. Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter. “And how did you research one’s character?”

This must be the first time the Queen has met one of her impersonators. These days you can’t move for actresses who’ve played Queen Elizabeth I, including Mirren, but a residual deference to the owner of the face on the coins and the stamps has kept portrayals of QEII to a respectful trickle. The actress Jeannette Charles has made an honest buck out of a passing resemblance, most recently in the film “Austin Powers: Goldmember”. The Queen cuts a more approachable figure in Roald Dahl’s story for children, “The BFG”, than the grisly old ladies found in the rest of his work. Even the pitiless lampoonists of “Spitting Image” always struggled to lay a glove on her.

One of the first writers to intuit that there is absolutely no future in rubbishing the Queen was Bennett. In “A Question of Attribution”, his 1988 play about the former Soviet spy and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt, she makes a cameo appearance as a tartly knowing commentator on fakery and illusion. Prunella Scales, the dragon of “Fawlty Towers”, played her both on stage, at the National, and then on television. Now, nearly 20 years on, Bennett is having a second go at Her Majesty in “The Uncommon Reader”. She still comes up smelling of roses.

Her interest in literature is pricked by accident when, out of a customary sense of duty, she finds herself idly borrowing a book from Kensington and Chelsea’s mobile library parked up in one of the Palace’s courtyards. She is soon racing through classics ancient and modern with the avidity of a convert--or, to use a word she learns from her researches, an opsimath: one who learns only late in life.

She may learn late, but she also learns fast. To the dismay of politicians and flunkies, literature instils in the Queen such dangerous concepts as egalitarianism, empathy and, horror of horrors, humanity. “I think I may be turning into a human being,” she notes after an early tussle with Henry James, “I am not sure this is an altogether welcome development.” Quite the contrary. Dame Helen has the awards to prove that a glimpse behind the mask is extremely welcome. Even if it’s pure fiction.