History, it is said, is just one damned thing after another. I've long felt that the best biographies provide the illusion that this is not the case. Instead, a skilled biographer will craft what can only be called a narrative from the series of events that make up the subject's life. They render this party a character--as thorny and fully-fledged as any great literary creation. I suspect readers of biographies do not read simply to learn the minutiae of a celebrity's life, but rather to view the celebrity as a whole person--as complex as the reader herself. In a way, we seek the answers, themes, resolutions that are usually found only in fiction.

Sadly, I found few of these literary elements in Elizabeth The Queen.

It started out promising enough, with a description of Elizabeth's supposedly-controversial love marriage to Prince Philip. Ah, I thought, here it is: our thesis. It seemed to me that Sally Bedell Smith was priming herself to argue that Elizabeth was a passionate creature, ruled by love despite the reserved, cool exterior . . . but this biography's substantial bulk did not fulfill on this promise at all.

Instead, I found 500-plus pages which painstakingly detailed every move of Elizabeth's life--the many boat trips, meetings with various presidents, the breeding lineages of her horses--but mostly failed to move me. This might be because every event was described in the same obsessive level of detail. We're given the impression that in the author's mind, if not in the mind of the Queen herself, all of these events are equal and equivalent.

In truth, only some of these events held any interest for me (I'd say about half). These were the stories of Elizabeth's relationships: the chilly attitude she seemed to hold toward her children; the complex balance between Elizabeth and her alcoholic sister; the defacto-commuter-marriage between Elizabeth and Philip. Smith offers the tantalizing detail, for example, that Elizabeth has long disdained divorced couples, an attitude which seemed to have led, in part, to her sister's rejection of one suitable fiance. This idea echoes throughout the text, but is never focused on with intense enough scrutiny by Smith for us to really know what to make of it.

This failure to develop her own central arguments might be due, I suspect, to a desire not to offend the living monarch. But this cripples this biography as art or as compelling story. Sections strain credulity--the chapters where Diana is painted as a mentally unhinged villain, for example, seems particularly lacking in nuance; likewise, the claim that Prince Philip has never cheated feels somewhat self-evidently not believable. The primary theme here is that Elizabeth is a swell girl. That's fine, but even swell girls have demons--they make mistakes, they falter.

And those showings of humanity are the reason I read biographies, really. Oh, don't get me wrong. This one is exhaustive (if sometimes exhausting), thorough, and informative. But ultimately, it failed to be a really interesting book.