The Uncommon Reader

by Alan Bennett

It was the City of Westminster travelling library, a large removal-like van parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors.

!

Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn’t necessarily the road to the public’s heart.

‘Oh, to the end. Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.’

This commission caused him some anxiety. Well-read up to a point, he was largely self-taught, his reading tending to be determined by whether an author was gay or not. Fairly wide remit though this was, it did narrow things down a bit, particularly when choosing a book for someone else, and the more so when that someone else happened to be the Queen.

‘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.’

The reading, though, made him uneasy. ‘I feel, ma’am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude.’ ‘Exclude? Surely most people can read?’ ‘They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.’ ‘Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting them a good example.’

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. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common.

‘What are you reading at the moment?’ To this very few of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects had a ready answer (though one did try: ‘The Bible?’).

The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarising what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her.

And seeing the blue- and pink-jacketed volumes ranged along her desk, the Queen thought they looked almost edible and straight out of a pâtisserie window.

The Queen gave her wide smile. The interview was over. How the Queen conveyed this information had always been a mystery to Sir Claude, but it was as plain as if a bell had rung.

‘The question,’ said the Queen, ‘was rhetorical.’