VILE BODIES
From the archive
Another from my Bookforum archive. I wouldn’t have thought I could enjoy anything non-Shakespeare about the Royal Family until I recently put on Becket, the 1964 film directed by Peter Glenville from Jean Anouilh’s play, starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole in an utterly spellbinding actors’ duel. It’s on Criterion, if you have that option.
HER STRUGGLE
Hilary Mantel concludes her Thomas Cromwell trilogy
THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT BY HILARY MANTEL. NEW YORK: HENRY HOLT. 784 PAGES. $30.
One Thanksgiving during the four years I was a resident of London, at a dinner of Americans and French people, one of the Yanks at the table remarked that if she were a member of the English working class, she “would be throwing Molotov cocktails on the King’s Road and torching Buckingham Palace.” There had been riots in London the year before, student protests were a constant, and the previous autumn had seen the occupation of St. Paul’s, but none of this energy had been directed at the royal family. The Windsors are subsidized at a rate of £82 million a year, or £1.24 per British citizen, an amount it’s said they more than make up for by contributing to the economy as human tourist attractions, not to mention as mascots for various charitable causes. “Americans care more about the royal family than the British do,” another American expatriate friend of mine once remarked shortly after I’d arrived in London. “Speak for yourself,” I said. “Many of us don’t care about them at all.” Such was my disanglophilia, a failure to love English things and to love Englishness. I also fail to appreciate soccer. “That’s a shame,” someone told me. “If you liked football, you would be happier.” Perhaps I’d also be happier if I were inclined to take an interest in princes and princesses, living or dead.
If the royal family, history’s walking hangover, were abolished tomorrow, would cultural production chronicling the foibles of the English monarchy cease, or even slow down? The prospect is unlikely. Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; the soft exit of Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan Markle, from public life; the revelation that Charles and Diana’s confidant and sometime marriage counselor Jimmy Savile was a serial pedophile—these scandals and contretemps only promise to become the fodder for ever more books and scripts about a once powerful family that is now merely a powerful distraction.
Speaking of distractions: Imagine a very long work of fiction published five hundred years in the future chronicling the turbulent career of the current American president, told from the point of view of one of his fixers—say, Michael Cohen. How much could such a fiction concern itself with the vicissitudes of the real estate business, or reality television, or even the mechanics of Russiagate? How interesting could such details be to the readers of the future? But one thing that always holds interest is sex. I wouldn’t want to read such a book, but I can imagine future readers who might. The three wives, the untold extramarital affairs with the likes of Stormy Daniels and who knows who else, and the victims of his alleged assaults. The story has been nauseating to live through. Perhaps given half a millennium and treatment from the right point of view it will read as an irresistible blend of farce and tragedy.