Good Queen Bess that just has to be a royal fairy story

Bess By Peter Preston (Viking, #15.99) The most interesting thing about Bess is why it is so improbable. The novel presents itself as an amusing, speculative take on Britain in the 2030s. Both Elizabeth II and Charles III have passed on and William has inherited the throne. Then his brother, Harry, crashes the plane in which the two royal brothers are flying with the king's young son and only child. So, just as she is about to take her A-levels and go to Oxford, it is Harry's daughter, Elizabeth, the Bess of the title, who becomes the unprepared queen.

Futuristic fiction famously projects the present into another time or planet where, as in a distorting mirror, we recognise ourselves in a strange guise. Preston's is a flat mirror. The country reflected back to us from 30 years ahead is one in which nothing has changed. The author seems to believe that this ghastly, dystopian vision is benign. The book's central conceit is that this being Britain nothing can ever change unless the monarch herself decrees it. And this, of course, is the most traditional belief of all.

Preston does introduce some tricks of futurology to make us believe his is a picture of the future. The Euro has replaced the pound and there is proportional representation. But the Treasury controls all expenditure in the same old way. Coalition government depends upon the febrile support of small parties and groups, just as it did under Callaghan and Major, while British politics remains just as leadercratic as ever and Scotland is still part of the union.

Above all, feminism has hardly arrived. A male journalist discovers the key fact that releases Bess from her marriage. He is seduced into passing the information on to her rather than publishing it himself. A male adviser changes sides to guide Bess in her hour of need. Reader, she marries him.

The people? They will never think for themselves. Preston puts the words into the mouth of the clever, unscrupulous Blair-type figure who states that the people are addicted to the great British drug of deference. "The trick is to turn them {kings and queens} into a higher level of authority so that you are their servant on earth and everybody down the chain recognises it - at least, until they start thinking, which they don't."

In this book, they certainly do not start thinking. The young, manipulated monarch is persuaded that only she can put an end to a broken monarchy. "There are always people - the people out there, the little grey ladies waving their flags, the newspaper editors who need something to write about - who'll resurrect it given a tenth of a chance." It falls to the Guardian reading queen, therefore, to terminate the hereditary principle.

In this way, the Guardian's most successful editor provides us with a story premised on the avuncular misanthropy which marks his newspaper. It knows best and means well, but recognises that all other human life is malicious and self-serving. It provides an odd vision of the future.

The women especially are stereotyped and the two commanding characters are an off-the-shelf whore/Madonna contrast. Bess herself is a completely improbable 20-year-old virgin, while her mother is a barbaric caricature of a scheming, promiscuous bitch. The mother personifies the fate of mid-20th century Britain, rancid with decline, scathing of hope and suffused with disbelief, whose only true passion is the rage of frustration. This was a 1950s mind-set, the culture of Look Back in Anger, only here presented as light entertainment.

If the queen's mother expresses the reality of 1950s Britain, Bess personifies its equally hollow hopes. A key myth lubricated post-war Britain - that the royals are just like us. That they suffer on our behalf. They are ordinary people but with a job that ordinary people would not have "if you paid me". Preston's apparently republican story indulges this myth of the royals as victims. He presents us with a good queen trapped by wicked, manipulative members of the establishment, the cliched view of the young Elizabeth when she was crowned in 1953. Endlessly reproduced and reinforced, this myth was re-invigorated by the wedding of Diana and Charles.

Then Diana claimed the legend for herself in her Panorama interview, when she argued that she was the normal, healthy and popular royal, while "the firm" were weird establishment figures. The opportunities for satire this ridiculous actuality presents are much greater than those taken by Preston. Diana may have remained a virgin, but only in order to capture the prince for whom, she explained, "one had to keep oneself tidy". And if she would hardly have kept this up until she was 20, at least her language has some bite and inventiveness which expresses the nature of the prize.

The monarchy is not a prison. It is an enjoyable, luxury racket. It provides acres of room for self-indulgence and getting away with things. The fight between Charles and Diana was over who would enjoy the prize. Further such behaviour might lead voters to dump the whole thing. But the last people to do so will be the royals themselves Anthony Barnett is director of Charter 88, and author of This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution (Vintage, #6.99)

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.