Most people who use public transport nowadays expect wifi, and expect to be able to play with their phones for free. I prefer to read a book. And if the book makes me laugh in a public place where laughter might be embarasing then I will brave that. I read 'Portnoy's Comlaint' by Phillip Roth on the bus, where if I tried to explain to anyone why it was funny I would have to say 'it is funny because it thilthy', which would be accurate. I did not read 'Venus In Furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or 'Crash' by J.G.Ballard in the bus, and there are surely many other books that need to read repeatedly to 'get the trick' of how they test taboos whilst breaking them, whilst hiding how they test taboo. But for the second third time of reading 'Venus In Furs' I think I will take it on the bus with me.
'An Uncommon Reader' made me laugh out loud so often that I lost count of how often I laughed. Whilst it is a compact, a novella, it brought joy to so many of my bus journeys that I wish it was longer.
Bennett had an easy target - The Queen - who needs no further introduction but about whom few have any real clue as to what she thought about what she was so often seen to do when she and Prince Philip were both in robust health - when this was written. Nearly twenty years later we distantly observed their decline in public. On to this full-of-life blank canvas of The Queen, Bennett creates a landscape of modern popular reading habits. He mentions so many authors and books, and drew out more humour inherent from each book and author than I thought was possible. Google tells me that Bennett shoe-horns 55 different and distinguished authors onto The Queen's reading list, and offered to list the alphabetically for me. I declined. Most of jokes I found to be enormously funny, where the slighter the joke the funnier it seemed on the page. This led me to play a sort of authorial bingo as a read, where I could cross the author off if I had read them, could not cross them off when I hadn't.
This led neatly into my memory of first reading of the novella, where what I wanted to rediscover in better detail was what Bennettt gives The Queen to think when she enquires about infamous French author Jean Genet, a spikey non-conformist writer who survived being raised in a series of children's homes and borstals, who survived a criminal underworld that changed him for life. His writings were difficult for English readers, who had to work their way through archaic, some would say tortured, English grammar in the translations of his early books 'Funeral Rites' and 'Our Lady Of The Flowers', which were popular as items on the book shelves in the early 1970s in paperback editions but may have been less fully read as an author. This was where Bennett literary conceit either reached it's peak or collapsed, it is hard to say which, but a new plot kicked in. Marcel Proust is mentioned to The Queen to divert her away from the more subversive and opaque writings in English tranaslation by Jean Genet.
From the start the plot revolved around The Queen and her senior equerries dodging each other and mostly talking indirectly about reading (the queen) or avoiding reading (what the equerries sought of the queen) as her majesty sought to find more books to read and more time to read them, whilst her staff resorted to hiding her books from her when they could do so without being seen to.
The chase around reading eventually wears thin for The Queen, who is consistently funny in a rather Prunella Scales sort of way, when she refers to herself in the third person as 'one', but breaks that habit with a certain bathos as on her own she write to herself 'I have no voice' as she conciders creartive writing to finding her voice after the example of Marcel Proust. Though the country knows more literally that how she actually spoke: in the voice that Gainsborough films studios coached it's actresses to speak in the films it made circa 1946 which became the model for Recieved Pronounciation.
The book ends at curious point. It more stops than ends, leaving the reader wondering what might have come next - apart from the disguised decline of old age which comes to all who live long enough to adapt their embrace of such decline.
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