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“No one in human history lived a more chronicled life than the Queen,” Craig Brown writes in the opening pages of A Voyage Around the Queen, his biography of the woman who became Elizabeth II. It’s possible, Brown says, to “chart her movements, on an almost daily basis, from the moment she was born to the moment she died”. She barely went a week of her 96 years without being photographed, and those photographs then being disseminated around the globe. But despite the sheer volume of pictures and press snippets, she remained almost entirely inscrutable: she kept her true self hidden and set the blueprint for what we’ve come to think of as royal image management in the process (a blueprint that some of her descendants have ripped up).
Is it even possible to find something new, even revelatory, to say about this most documented of women? If A Voyage Around the Queen is anything to go by, the answer is yes – you just have to look at her from a different angle. Brown is a satirist previously best known for his parodic celebrity diaries in Private Eye, but in recent years he has pioneered a kaleidoscopic approach to biography.
His books play with this traditional form, giving as much space to examining the cultural phenomenon that springs up around a celebrity as to pure biographical detail. In his previous works, Ma’am Darling, a portrait of the Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret, and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, he shone fresh light on his subjects by approaching them side on, in a slightly topsy-turvy fashion that allows their character to emerge in unexpected ways; he mixed imagined conversations, conspiracy theories and parodies with interview transcripts, magazine cuttings and lists.
There can be no difficulty in finding source material relating to the Queen (for simplicity’s sake, Brown refers to the late monarch with this title throughout his book, largely because, he explains, when we hear that word, it is still Elizabeth that we think of first). The first chronicle of her life appeared in 1930, when she was just four – “she is the world’s best known Baby,” its pages declared, before gushingly describing the royal tot’s beauty and “serene courage”. A steady stream of books promising an insider’s take on her and her family have followed ever since, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, none really seemed to permeate this most private of public figures.
Unlike Brown’s previous biographical subjects, the Queen could never really say or do anything especially groundbreaking or controversial. By virtue of her royal position, politeness and tradition were her mainstays. These are qualities that don’t automatically make for the most fascinating of narratives, so Brown must be ever more creative in his approach.
There is a phonetic guide to the royals’ unique brand of received pronunciation, a list of the words that Prince Philip hated most (including “conurbation” and “charismatic”), letters to newspapers, descriptions of encounters with the monarch both real and made up. There are even dream diaries featuring members of the public’s nighttime imaginings, a rendering of a corgi family tree and a compilation of the many, many times that the Queen was described as “radiant” by the people who met her. Brown’s focus is on the monarch herself, rather than her younger relatives, but there is a wonderful digressive chapter recounting the woeful failure of It’s a Royal Knockout. In 1987, Prince Edward decided that the best way to make the Windsors seem relatable would be for them to star in a medieval-themed game show along with some minor stars. Prince Andrew reportedly ended up trying to push Meatloaf into a moat; Jonathan Dimbleby would later describe it as a “nadir” for the royals.
Indeed, Brown mixes high and low culture even more gleefully in his new book. The Queen’s meetings with great politicians and poet laureates are as important as her encounters with celebrities, and are recounted with similarly gossipy flair. Kingsley Amis, we learn, was so terrified of becoming flatulent when he received his knighthood that he “had his doctor lay down a firewall of Imodium”, according to son Martin. Phil Collins, meanwhile, started whistling the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind immediately after getting through a conversation with her, “possibly out of a sense of relief that his ordeal was over”.
Among Brown’s main preoccupations here is the strange, “discombobulating” effect that the Queen had on her public – the ones who actually encountered her in person and those who only knew her as a face on coins and stamps. One of the illustrative anecdotes he features sees Tony Benn, then postmaster general and an avowed anti-monarchist, attempt to get said face taken off stamps, only to get quietly outmanoeuvred by the Queen and her staff over and over. Elizabeth II, the writer suggests, was essentially “a human looking glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those facing her”. People saw what they wanted to see in her, which was often some version of their own attitudes.
Sometimes that “light” dazzled them so much that they might feel “giddy or woozy”, prone to speaking strangely, behaving oddly or doing a comically low curtsey, a la Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes people would respond to the Queen’s conversational pleasantries (“Have you come far?” or “How interesting!”) with hysterical laughter or great reverence. Brown has plenty of fun skewering the bizarre ways in which we respond to royalty, but he also explores how sometimes the simplest of royal utterances could take on a certain perceptiveness. Take, for example, an encounter with the novelist Sybille Bedford, who tells the Queen she has been writing “all [her] life”, only for the monarch to respond with “Oh dear! Oh well.” Those four words, Brown says, inadvertently got to the heart of Bedford’s attitude to her work: she had always “found the act of writing close to unbearable”. Brown doesn’t imbue every royal act with an inflated sense of import and meaning (as some biographers have been prone to do) but he also has a light touch when it comes to these moments that sum up the monarch’s balancing act between the banal and the almost talismanic or mystical.
If the Queen’s conversation and behaviour were constantly constricted by protocol, the corgis, Brown suggests, seemed to embody all the chaos that her life lacked. The sections he dedicates to these anarchic dogs are among the book’s silliest and most enjoyable, as Her Majesty’s fleet of tiny canines tear through palaces and castles, biting the ankles of various notable guests; during one lunch at Windsor, the politician Alan Johnson accidentally ate their “unusual dark biscuits”, accompanied with cheese. They become her “avatars”, able to act out in a way that the Queen never could. “Dogs have interesting instincts, don’t they?” the Queen apparently mused, “with a knowing look” after David Blunkett’s guide dog took a disliking to Vladimir Putin.
The corgis also feature in one of a few genuinely moving stories recalled here. At another royal lunch, the surgeon David Nott found himself in tears when asked about his work on the battlefields of Aleppo. The Queen briskly turned their conversation towards her dogs, and the pair sat feeding them for half an hour. “The humanity of what she was doing was unbelievable,” Nott said. In this context, you start to understand why a photograph showing the corgis waiting for her funeral cortege ended up as one of that day’s most poignant images. Glimmers like these, Brown knows, can be more evocative of character (and perhaps, of how we create a sense of someone’s character) than stolid facts or tell-all interviews.
