What I'm streaming: a bit more edge in the royal soap opera

 THE CROWN - Series Four (Netflix)

Not quite bingeing: I’ve taken a week to get through the ten new episodes, covering Diana Spencer’s elevation from playschool assistant to the People’s Princess – the marriage which Prince Charles, in this adaptation, rightly calls a “misalliance”. The interview when Charles said “Whatever ‘in love’ means” is recreated to remind us that Lady Di never was embarking on a Happy-Ever-After fairy tale. We don’t yet get to the “three people in this marriage” interview, but Mrs Parker-Bowles looms large throughout the series, even lunching Diana after the Engagement (factual, we’re told) but never fading out of Charles’s life, which may or may not be the truth. Did he really talk to her almost every day?

Emma Corrin and Josh O'Connor
as Charles and Diana

Emma Corrin looks exactly right in the replica frocks and recreates the Diana we think we knew, fragile and needy, sometimes a bit pushy, always conscious of being an unwelcome but necessary brood-mare. The bulimia puking scenes are overdone. Josh O’Connor’s Charles appears to be developing a hunchback but he gets the voice off rather well. Emerald Fennell’s Camilla has more the look of Sarah Ferguson; intriguing (if it’s true) that she urged Charles to marry Diana but didn’t realize that she needed to let him go, whether he wanted to be let go or not.

Stephen Boxer and Gillian Andersen
as Denis and Margaret Thatcher

These are also the Thatcher Years, of which some of us do not have the fondest memories. Gillian Anderson’s Maggie gets almost as much screen time as Elizabeth our Queen; her portrayal is in the same vein as Spitting Image’s used to be; she occasionally appears to be auditioning for Cruella de Vil, but like Meryl Streep she gets that Nanny-Knows-Best voice off to a T (to a Mrs T!)

Olivia Colman settles very comfortably into Her Majesty’s sensible shoes; the escalating tension during the weekly audiences with the Prime Minister is something you long to believe in. Accurate or not, the scene when Michael Fagan invades her bedroom is pitch-perfect from both parties. Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip is presented as almost a still small voice of calm, not quite the image tittle-tattle gave us over decades past.

Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret and Erin Doherty as Princess Anne are both splendid – imperious, bitter and bitchy. Marion Bailey’s Queen Mother is a bit like Nan in The Royle Family; there’s an edgy moment when she tries to justify her mentally challenged relations (“imbeciles,” they were called) being incarcerated for decades in an Edwardian-era lunatic asylum.

Christmas at Sandringham - not-so-happy families

The ethics – the morality – of this production remains open to question. It must be hard for William and Harry – and everybody else – to know that their friends are watching it and, like us, wondering how much of it is true. Interviews with cast members have stressed that this is a fictional dramatization, but most viewers will accept it as history, despite the liberties taken by Peter Morgan’s screenplay.

This is gossip and speculation lavishly amplified to soap opera. Yes, it’s terrifically well done and makes very watchable viewing, but it does the Royal Family a huge disservice. There’s a key scene in which the Australian Prime minister Bob Hawke bemoans the fact that Diana and Charles’s tour of Oz has set back the republican cause, but now, in 2020, how many people – here in the UK – feel as committed to the Monarchy as they did when Lady Di walked into St Paul’s in that curiously rumpled wedding dress?

What I'm reading: the best novel of the past fifty years?

Michael Ondaatje: THE ENGLISH PATIENT

In 2018, 9,000 people voted for this as the best of the Booker Prize-winning novels in the award’s fifty years. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had previously been hailed as the best of 25 and then 40 years.

I’m a huge admirer of Anthony Minghella’s 1996 movie of The English Patient, but I’d missed reading the novel until now. It’s only 320 pages, but I found it a tough read. Stylistically it’s very dense, skipping between present and past tenses with frequent viewpoint switches. The story is fragmentary, and it certainly helps to have seen the movie which had a more linear timeframe.

It’s 1945 and Italy has been liberated by the Allies. Hana, a young Canadian nurse, is looking after a hideously burnt man in a ruined villa in Tuscany. She is joined by a fellow Canadian, Caravaggio, who seems to be AWOL, and a Sikh bomb-disposal sapper, Kip, with whom she falls in love. The English patient (who is not actually English) tells the other three of his time before the war exploring Egyptian ruins in the Sahara and of his affair with the new young wife of one of the archaeologists’ backers.

Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas
as Almasy and Katharine

As in the movie, the relationship between Almasy and Katharine has a kind of cold intensity. Almasy’s trek across the desert to fetch medical aid for Katharine, left injured in the Cave of Swimmers after the plane crash, is epic, but I wasn’t moved by it as much as by the tenderness between the nurse and the sapper.

The desert scenes and Tuscan landscapes are as vivid on the page as in Minghella’s visual feast of a movie. A sequence when Kip defuses a bomb is very cinematic. The English Patient is clearly a masterpiece of English writing, but I could only read a few pages at a time. There’s a lyrical quality to Ondaatje’s prose which requires re-reading as you go. Occasionally I felt I was getting echoes of T.S. Eliot. The only comparable novels I can think of are Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which I hugely admired in my twenties but would perhaps find a bit ‘indigestible’ today.

Wikipedia will remind you of all the Booker shortlisted novels and winners through its 50-plus years. My personal favourite, not a winner but shortlisted in 1980, is Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, a deeply powerful novel on the theme of Faith and Human Frailty. And I remember reviewing Rushdie’s Shame (1983), another runner-up, as a work of “Genius”, not a word I’ve been generous with. Looking for books that have given me the most pleasure rather than mere admiration, I’m going to plump for The Carpetbaggers and The Adventurers, both by Harold Robbins, two novels from the 1960s which thrillingly explored the world of Hollywood and Jet-Set celebrity.  Do I need to hide my head in embarrassment?

I’d welcome seeing your all-time favourites in the Comment Box.