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the complete review - fiction

The Uncommon Reader

by
Alan Bennett

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : charming, good fun, and more than just a trifle

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Good (if a bit limited) fun, and worthwhile

  From the Reviews:

• "The staggeringly prodigious Bennett (...) has fun with the writers and books the queen relishes (and doesn't). Avid readers will enjoy his playful erudition in this entertaining reminder as to why we read and write." - Terry Hong, Christian Science Monitor
  
  
• "The Uncommon Reader is a delight. Reading it over a morning and evening’s tube-struck commute, I never stopped smiling -- only a right royal churl could declare himself not amused by Bennett’s comic wizardry (.....) His storytelling, though, is rather less magical. (...) But the real problem is that The Uncommon Reader disobeys its own diktats, failing utterly to dramatise the Queen’s sentimental education." - Christopher Bray, Financial Times
  
  
• "In its witty, economical satire, The Uncommon Reader recalls the late work of Muriel Spark, whose The Finishing School sent up the business of publishing. Like Spark, Bennett relies on plot twists that strain credulity at every turn, but the book is such a romp, it doesn't matter." - Maud Newton, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(T)he scenario begins to lose steam well before the novella's 120 pages are through. The book is neither outrageous nor subversive enough to succeed fully as satire, and at the same time lacks the shading of The History Boys, whose central principle -- knowledge for knowledge's sake -- was rendered with a trace of melancholy and moral ambivalence. At times, it falls back on trite endorsements of the written word (.....) Though The Uncommon Reader is dotted with a few sharp-edged moments such as this, it functions mostly as a lighthearted thought experiment." - Michael Schulman, The New York Sun
  
  
• "Mr. Bennett’s musings on these matters have produced a delightful little book that unfolds into a witty meditation on the subversive pleasures of reading. (...) In recounting this story of a ruler who becomes a reader, a monarch who’d rather write than reign, Mr. Bennett has written a captivating fairy tale. It’s a tale that’s as charming as the old Gregory Peck-Audrey Hepburn movie Roman Holiday, and as keenly observed as Stephen Frears’s award-winning movie The Queen -- a tale that showcases its author’s customary élan and keen but humane wit." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "The story of her budding love affair with literature blends the comic and the poignant so smoothly it can only be by Bennett. It’s not his very best work, but it distills his virtues well enough to suggest how such a distinctive style might have arisen. (...) Like most of Bennett’s fiction, this is a slender work -- an afternoon’s read. Yet even at this length, it feels a trifle thin." - Jeremy McCarter, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "This is not a book that is particularly interested in telling us what the Queen is like. Fair enough; it’s fiction. It is not a book, either, that is particularly interested in imagining plausibly what the Queen might be like. Rather, it vamps round the stock ideas, available to any television sketch show or student revue, of what she is like. (...) What’s different, then, between The Uncommon Reader and any television sketch show or student revue ? The difference is in the sentences. What distinguishes this, and most of Bennett’s work, is not its perceptiveness about the world, or its imaginative achievement, but its droll and exact stylistic commmand. The effect, in this and in much of his work, is to make him the literary equivalent of a brilliant cartoonist." - Sam Leith, The Spectator
  
  
• "The author’s taste for the camp cliché, his surreal exchanges (...) and the easy satire on management jargon (...) are not intended solely to amuse, but nor do they simply bolster a cosy argument about the civilising benefits of libraries, or a jibe at bestsellers. (...) For all its hilarity The Uncommon Reader has a heartfelt tone. It offers a lament on old age, some thoughts on reticence and a backward glance at a life wasted. At times, it even seems to side with Sir Kevin’s view that reading is a selfish practice." - Lindsay Duguid, Sunday Times
  
  
• "(A)n exquisitely produced jewel of a book (.....) (I)t would be easy to mistake it for a gentle jeu d’esprit; one of those wry, melancholy slivers of observation at which Bennett excels. It isn’t though. Beneath the tasteful gilt-and-beige cover seethes a savagely Swiftian indignation against stupidity, Philistinism and arrogance in public places, and a passionate argument for the civilising power of art." - Jane Shilling, The Times
  
  
• "The Uncommon Reader improves delightfully on an otherwise depressing reality, while slily arraigning the ambiguous British romance with the monarchy and its current avatar." - Jonathan Keates, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The Uncommon Reader is a political and literary satire. But it's also a lovely lesson in the redemptive and subversive power of reading and how one book can lead to another and another and another. (...) The Uncommon Reader is an appreciation of reading not out of obligation, but purely for pleasure, without being preachy and pretentious." - Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
  
  
• "What might in less capable hands result in a labored exercise or an embarrassing instance of literary lêse-majesté here becomes a delicious light comedy, as well as a meditation on the power of print. (...) You can finish The Uncommon Reader in an hour or two, but it is charming enough and wise enough that you will almost certainly want to keep it around for rereading -- unless you decide to share it with friends. Either way, this little book offers what English readers would call very good value for money." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The 'uncommon reader' of the title of this novella is English Queen Elizabeth II. In Bennett's charming little fantasy the Queen's life takes a dramatic turn when she discovers the pleasure of reading -- much to the chagrin of many around her.
       At first the Queen isn't a big book fan at all:

She had never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people. It was a hobby and it was in the nature of her job that she didn't have hobbies.

     'Of course,' said the Queen, 'but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.'

     Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

     The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not.

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Profile Books publicity page
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
• Profile in The Scotsman
• Discussion at The Scotsman Book Club
• Article in The Independent by Boyd Tonkin
• Article in The Telegraph by A.N.Wilson

• Asylum
• The Bookbag
• California Literary Review
• Christian Science Monitor (scroll down for review)
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• John Baker's Blog
• LeseLust (German)
• LeseLustFrust (German)
• Lissa Reads ...
• The List
• The Los Angeles Times
• Metro
• The New York Sun
• paper diet books
• PopMatters
• The Spectator
• stevereads
• Sunday Times
• The Times
• USA Today
• The Washington Post

• Biography and bibliography at Museum of Broadcast Communications
• Profile in The Guardian

• The Clothes They Stood Up in
• An Englishman Abroad
• Father ! Father ! Burning Bright
• The Habit of Art
• The History Boys
• The Lady in the Van
• The Laying on of Hands
• A Question of Attribution

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
• See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction

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About the Author:

       British author, playwright, and actor Alan Bennett appeared in Beyond the Fringe and has written numerous highly acclaimed works.

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© 2007-2010 the complete review

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