FICTION: HILARY FANNINreviews Untold StoryBy Monica Ali Doubleday, 345pp. £16.99
LONDON, 1997. I wake up late at my mother-in-law’s home, in Bayswater, then lash down the road to the bus stop outside Kensington Gardens, trying to make my way to Heathrow to catch a plane home. The streets swarm with stunned people clutching flowers. I think I’ve stumbled on to a movie set. At the airport news stands Princess Diana’s blue eyes beseech from every front page. The “people’s princess” is dead, and Britain is snapping its stays with the force of its lament. People are weeping on the concourse. I’m relieved to board the plane, to sidestep the convulsion.
Monica Ali's pretty new novel, Untold Story, is inspired by the life and death of Diana Spencer, the doe-eyed, virginal teen bride who married and divorced an ambivalent Prince Charles, bore him two sons, chewed her way in and out of bulimia and used her iconic status to alleviate the plight of landmine victims and Aids sufferers. The most-photographed woman of the age, she lived a life captured in long lens. Now Ali has reimagined Diana's absence, using her death as a point of departure for this, her fourth novel.
Ali has said that she found Diana, whose life “blended fairy tale with nightmare”, a mesmerising subject, possibly not a view that will be shared by all. Certainly, at times irritatingly, Ali’s admiration for her subject invades the pages of this demure yarn.
Ali’s “fictionalised” princess (ex-wife of the heir to the throne, mother of two strapping sons and former bulimic who couldn’t stand the damp boredom of Balmoral) is, having faked her own drowning, now living under the assumed identity of Lydia Snaresbrook in small-town America, in a decorous community called Kensington.
In gently crafted scenes, reminiscent of a dreary episode of Desperate Housewives, we encounter Lydia sharing a giggly supper with her four girlfriends. Like a wrinkling girl band they include a smart brunette, a dippy blonde, a heart-of-gold tomboy and, of course, Lydia herself, the somewhat reticent Posh Spice in their midst. We also see Lydia at work, in a canine rescue centre, and at play, with both her faithful hound, Rufus, and her equally loyal and eager boyfriend, Carson. Carson is a "serious-minded" American with a lonely past, a man with hollows in his rugged neck that are full either of woodchip (Carson has a tendency to saw things up when he's hurtin') or Lydia's copious tears.
So far, so paperback romance. Then Lydia’s hard-won idyll is threatened by the arrival of former paparazzo Grabowski, a middle-aged-spreading, rosary-bead-clutching snapper, who, possibly uniquely for a pap, is looking for some meaning in his life. When he happens to stumble into the American Kensington he finds he has the biggest story of his career on his hands – and, kapow, we are in the midst of a mildly flaccid thriller.
Ali, despite appearing a little starstruck by her subject matter, is a graceful storyteller, and the weave of Lydia’s endangered present lies easily with the telling of her secret past. Her devastating guilt at leaving her sons, her erratic behaviour, her lovers and the luxurious chaos of her former life are described through a series of diary extracts and letters between the princess and her former private secretary, the terminally ill Lawrence Standing.
Romance? Thriller? Soap opera? Serious investigation of the life of one of the most iconic figures of our age? This novel has as many disguises, and as complex an assortment of masks, as its subject. And whether this clever book is tat in a Hermès headscarf or the crown jewels under a cheap wig is probably entirely irrelevant. This novel, like the countless magazines, newspapers, tea towels and souvenir mugs that Diana’s face sold over the decades of her extraordinary fame, will move off the shelves by the pound. It’s a knowing pastiche, a book savvy enough to jump into your shopping bag and pack itself in your holiday luggage. Damn it, this book is so smart it could probably spray on your sunscreen while you’re turning its pages.
Hilary Fannin is a playwright and journalist. Her most recent play was Phaedra, for Rough Magic. She is currently writing a new play for the company
