Ever since his early 1990s blockbuster
“
Diana: Her True Story” about the Princess of Wales (which was expanded after
her death), Andrew Morton has been the best known and most accessible, if not
the foremost, biographer of England’s royal family. He is on a first-name basis
with the lot of them, at least on the page.
اضافة اعلان
Before “Diana”, Morton had written books on Andrew
and Sarah. After “Diana”, he turned to William and Kate; to Wallis; to Meghan;
to Diana and Diana and Diana again, like a whirling dervish of dish, and most
recently to Elizabeth and Margaret. (A Monica Lewinsky book was in there, too.)
He has been upstairs and downstairs, chatted with courtiers and correspondents
and, he hints, befriended some in the innermost circle who would rather stay
anonymous. He could have written a stand-alone biography of Elizabeth in his
sleep — and now perhaps he has.
“
The Queen: Her Life” was originally supposed to be
published next spring, but then Her Majesty, in a final act of her famous
grace, died in time for the holiday book-buying season — and, as it happens,
the fifth season of the Netflix series “The Crown”, in which Morton, receiving
the ultimate tribute to his trade, is played by actor Andrew Steele.
I cannot fault his publisher for wanting to
capitalize on this confluence of events. But even though the new biography was
finished in August, according to publicity materials, it feels rushed and
undernourished. That does not seem entirely worthy of its sturdy subject, who
was born in 1926, and, Morton writes in one of several flights of floridity,
quickly put to sleep beneath “an imagined layette of magic and myth, a gossamer
blanket where new threads were constantly interwoven into the patchwork of
legend and reality.” Like Linus Van Pelt’s, this was “a blanket that would
accompany her throughout her life”.
No matter what
one thinks of the monarchy as it has changed and frayed, been interrogated and
even ridiculed, the woman this baby would become, and her long-running
leadership, deserves thoughtful analysis: more than a dash through the existing
literature and a quick dip into Special Collections.
Even during a rote command performance, Morton can
be droll and dry, noting that our heroine’s upbringing was “less Disney, more
brothers Grimm” and that her gilded paternal bloodline included a dentist. I
enjoyed learning the word “rumbustious” and that the royals once amused
themselves on a beach in a downright Kennedyesque fashion, flinging “small
pellets of bird dung” at one another and then catapulting into the sea. Though
tellingly, Elizabeth sat out the fun.
But all but the most uninformed readers are in for
quite a bit of recapitulation, often of facts that are already canonical. Four
times they will be told that Elizabeth’s father, King George, suffered from
“gnashes,” or outbursts of temper, caused by frustration over his stammer.
Thrice they will be reminded that
Princess Margaret and her husband, Antony
Armstrong-Jones, were leading glamor symbols of the London swinging ’60s style
scene. Diana’s bulimia, which she revealed to Morton in ’92 and then again in a
notorious interview with Martin Bashir (also depicted on the new season of “The
Crown”) is revisited: fleetingly but repeatedly.
Even during a rote command performance, Morton can be droll and dry, noting that our heroine’s upbringing was “less Disney, more brothers Grimm” and that her gilded paternal bloodline included a dentist.
Elizabeth had a red box of government dispatches
delivered almost daily; her chronicler’s red box is stuffed rather with cliché.
Since Bob Dylan has his own book out now, I might have allowed Morton one
rueful observation, after John Lennon tells an audience of royals to “just
rattle your jewelry”, that “the times really were a-changin’”. Reaching for
that phrase again as Prince Edward is permitted to cohabit with his future wife
Sophie Rhys-Jones in adjoining rooms at Buckingham Palace smacks of simple
laziness. The phrase “wide of the mark” appears twice in three sentences. And
did Morton really type that his subject would be “a hard act to follow”? Yes,
yes he did.
“The Queen” is not terrible; it is just terribly
serviceable, with names, dates, and places cantering past like Elizabeth’s
beloved horses over the course of 375 pages — which, if you do the math, is
under four for each year of her life, like a special-edition Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
The tense changes necessitated by her death could
have used one more combing-over. “She has the kind of face that looks angry
when she is trying not to smile,” Morton writes. We have a name for that, my
good man.
And some odd or unnecessary anachronisms and
Americanizations leap out, including that
Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s grandmother,
sought a “therapist” for advice about her son Edward’s affair with Wallis Simpson
and that Elizabeth and Margaret’s nanny, Crawfie, took them for distracting
excursions on London’s “subway”.
These might be minor traffic violations if “The
Queen” weren’t overall such a clip job — deft and confident, but a clip job
nonetheless. And often Morton is clipping … himself. The publication of “Diana:
Her True Story” is treated with odd impersonality, cited and then consulted,
along with a sequel, “Diana: In Pursuit of Love”, for chapters on the
disintegrating marriages of the queen’s children and her infamous “annus
horribilis”, when Windsor Castle was severely damaged in a fire and Morton
became part of the narrative. The author even appears in his own index. Maybe
that is living the dream.
If you know nothing whatsoever about Elizabeth Windsor,
this is a perfectly satisfactory primer. But if you are a buff of the royal
soap opera, it will feel like standing at a party having to nod and grin
politely while your husband, maybe after a few too many Pimm’s cups, tells one
of his favorite tales, that you have heard a million times, too fast, to
strangers.
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