My boyfriend recently read a book called “Battle Royal” by Kirstie MacLeod, and recommended it to me as something well worth reading. Nice as my boyfriend is, we don’t necessarily share the same taste in books, and so as a rule I might be rather apprehensive of his choices Nevertheless, he reviewed it so positively that it really did sound rather interesting, and I decided to give it a go. I started reading it for half an hour a night when I was in Bolton last week, to help me wind down from writing my article for La Brita Esperantisto. It did indeed have the desired result of sending me to sleep.

This is a book which fails in the aim to either be validly historical or biographical. If I attempt to review it as an historical book, it falls far short on many counts; there is a brief bibliography at the end but there are no footnotes, no referencing, no proper acknowledgement of where information has been obtained from. It is simply not rigorous enough to be considered as a serious work of historical non-fiction. It therefore follows that it must fall into the classification of biography. But whereas one can get away with publishing historical non-fiction if one is completely devoid of literary talent, to publish biographies whilst devoid of the said talent is at best tasteless and at worst criminal I’m sorry if that sounds pretentious, but my God, this was a boring book! It’s not even so much that I object to boring books, but this was a story which could have been *so* interesting if it had been written in an engaging way.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone read this book at all, but the subject matter is not uninteresting. It tells the story of the two royal brothers, David and Bertie. David would grow up to become Edward VIII and abdicate the throne to be with Wallis Simpson. His younger brother Bertie would eventually become George VI and marry the Queen Mum. The first few chapters of the book are particularly dull, as they deal with the childhood of the two boys. The book is in fact pervaded by a great deal of psychological analysis made by someone who appears not to have any qualifications to perform psychological analysis. Such and such a thing was done by the boys’ parents which meant that in later life they would be unable to avoid making such an such a mistake. I don’t subscribe to any of that garbage; I have plenty of personality defects of my own, but I’m not in the habit of blaming them on other people. By the time someone is a fully grown man, they need to be able to take responsibility for their own inadequacies rather than have them excused because their mother didn’t love them or their nanny beat them, or whatever.

The start of the book is also exceptionally confusing. It doesn’t demand an unreasonable amount of brainpower to remember that David is going to become Edward, and is just about possible to remember that Bertie is going to become George. It requires more concentration, however, not to confuse the George he is about to become with either the George his father has been or the George his brother currently is. Quite frankly, the book didn’t sufficiently inspire me to bother keeping track of which George was being discussed when.

On the whole, I found the story inherently depressing, and not just because it was so appallingly written. I had always thought that the story of the abdication was a nice romantic one, a King giving up the throne for a woman he loved, but it turned out to all be rather sordid and unpleasant, and I ended up deciding that I would rather have persisted in my delusion. Wallis Simpson is depicted as a total cow, David/Edward is an utter wet blanket, and the only person who comes out of the whole sorry mess with any dignity intact is the Queen Mum. The passages which touched on her were marginally interesting, as were the later chapters which touched on the relationship of the exiled royals to Nazi Germany, but that was all.

In general, I feel many rainforests might be saved if we refrained from publishing this sort of trashy non-fiction. If, however, you think I am grumpy and hormonal, then I suggest you nip across to my boyfriend’s blog to read a much more favourable review and see how totally unsuited we are to one another

Tags: abdication, Battle Royal, Kirstie MacLeod

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.