A Voyage Around the Queen

I've been planning to read a biography of the Queen since she died, but the reviews for Robert Hardman's very proper account put me off. 'This looks fun!' I thought, discovering Craig Brown's bright orange and pink cover; I enjoyed the author's 'history', if that's the right word, of the Beatles, and this is much the same style - eclectic, random, round the houses, irreverent, amusing - but FAR TOO LONG! At over 600 pages of footnotes, sources and formats, I nearly gave up - I'm not that into the Queen or the Royal family, I was just swept up in the pageantry of her death and funeral - but I persevered.

As with One, Two, Three, Four, this book is a mix of straight history, random sources, personal commentary, pop culture, long chapters, show more light chapters, and photographs (including one of Ringo as a hula girl at a Coronation celebration in 1953). There are segments on every part of the late Queen's life, from her beloved corgis (could have lived without the family trees), Prince Philip and his gaffs, the Queen in pop culture (Madame Tussauds to the Sex Pistols), famous/infamous meet and greets (Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy at one end of the scale, Idi Amin and Nicolae Ceaușescu at the other), poet laureates (plus poetry), Margaret Thatcher, the Royal yacht - and of course, Gyles bloody Brandreth (could have lived without his ha'p'orth too). The Family are also covered, from the irascible Princess Royal to Diana's death and the current social media circus with the Sussexes (Brown does not appreciate Harry's memoir at all).

There are weird chapters on people's dreams about the Queen - yeah, thanks, I'll pass - and a lengthy, rather jolly account of Rolf Harris' televised portrait painting in 2005. (I kept thinking, 'Really?' His conviction for sexual assault slots in at the end of an unnecessarily long chapter that could have been excised altogether.) To keep the subject interesting, Brown also throws in different formats - dialogue, quotes, multiple choice, and many sarky footnotes. Monarchist v republican is represented fairly, although I did come away with a slight distaste for the money wasted on one family, especially now that the Queen is gone.

And dear lord, we did not need a rehash of her death, funeral and public reaction from 2022! I know this book won't always be a contemporary history, but I ended up skimming through the last 50 or so pages. I could quite sympathise with HM, who by all accounts wasn't very good at spontaneous chitchat and had to shake countless hands over the years, and liked her best in her 'Paddington years' (2012-2022), and I don't envy the author having to compile this compendium of trivia, but my desire to learn more about the Queen is now quenched! show less

A Voyage Around The Queen is, almost inevitably, less irreverent than Brown’s biography of Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling. The spare princess, torn between her desire to be regal and bohemian, was a more suitable case for satire than her dutiful older sister. Actually there is a great deal of irreverence here but almost none of it is directed towards the Queen herself. I expect Brown recognised there was no point being iconoclastic about someone nobody really knew. Queen Elizabeth II suppressed her personality and opinions so completely in carrying out her public role that she effectively turned herself into a cipher.

As with his biographies of Princess Margaret and the Beatles, Brown did almost no primary research. He does, show more though, seem to have read every book ever written about the Queen and the royal family, an experience he describes as ‘like wading through candy floss, you emerge pink and queasy, but also undernourished’. Rather him than me, but from a mountain of trivia he constructs a panoramic and deceptively complex portrait of the Queen and her subjects. He even managed to convince me that her passion for horse racing and those yapping, disobedient corgis, gives an insight into her need for unpredictability and disruption in an overly ordered life.

Staying with the subject of trivia which is perhaps not so trivial, there is also the matter of the Queen’s voice and how it changed over the decades. In her early Christmas broadcasts her pronunciation of ‘had’ rhymed with ‘bed’ and ‘happy’ with ‘preppy’. By the 1980s they rhymed with ‘bad’ and ‘nappy’. This change was also true of practically everyone in British public life. At one time all famous Britons wanted to sound posh, but nowadays none of them do, least of all the posh. I recently watched some repeats of the BBC panel game Call My Bluff from the 1970s and everyone on it, including those of humble origins like Frank Muir, sounded more regal than the present King.

The idea of the Queen as a mirror in which others saw only themselves and their own prejudices provides Brown with a lot of mileage and funny stories. He also notes that, in marked contrast to her children and grandchildren, she ‘never confused being famous with being interesting’. As the rest of the royal family degenerated into a sort of soap opera and became an extension of the celebrity culture, the Queen remained majestically, yet somehow modestly, aloof and unknowable. She simply got on with her job. In a brilliantly empathetic sentence Brown says: ‘she survived the peculiar ordeal of her life by shielding herself in duty’. It certainly beats misery memoirs and baring your royal soul to Oprah.

The Queen lived a long life and this is a very long book. There were times when I felt myself overdosing on royalty and had to come up for air. Perhaps it’s best dipped into. I admit that, as a lifelong sceptic about constitutional monarchy and the British royal family, I’m not an obvious reader for a 662 page biography of the Queen (I read it primarily because it’s by Craig Brown, one of the funniest writers currently drawing breath). Still, this is a clever, good-humoured and entertaining book. It’s blessedly free of the dogmatic cliches and fixed positions (pro or anti) which usually infest a discussion of monarchy. Brown is rather like an amiable visitor from another planet investigating this curious phenomenon with genuine open-minded curiosity. The Queen herself remains ultimately elusive, but, in its seemingly offhand way, this is full of insights about the institution of monarchy and British society during her reign. show less

I haven't read other books by this author, which seems to make me an outlier of readers here. I enjoyed the way we circled the Queen in looking at her life, taking notes from the people around her and news and culture tidbits related to the Queen to show how her life was observed. It seems like maybe the only way to write a big book about her, as she was little more than her position as far as anyone can tell. She liked her dogs and horses and had no personality beyond that. She found conversation difficult and never offered solid opinions on anything. It is both hard to believe and entirely understandable that she became so void as a person so that the nation could see themselves reflected there instead