Customer Reviews

Untold Stories

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's a collection of reminiscences and essays that, taken together, form an autobiography of Alan Bennett. The account of his Yorkshire childhood and family is at the beginning, and that of his bout with colon cancer at the end, but the cobbling together is slightly random, so that some pieces are just tipped in anywhere, and there are occasional verbatim repetitions of quite long passages. I wouldn't recommend starting at page one and reading through the whole six hundred and fifty-three pages but it's addictive to dip into.

Many of the references to the British theatrical and television scene will be mysterious to Americans. A short test follows on which you may allocate yourself scores as a potential reader:

Lived in Britain before 1970 (6 points)

From Yorkshire (3 points)

Gay (1 points)

Interested in one of the following:

Good writing (3 points)

Beyond the Fringe , Monty Python, and the 1960's English satirists (3 points)

Treatment of depression.(1 point)

Treatment of cancer (1 point)

London theater (3 points)

Painting (1 point)

Old English churches (3 points)

Dealing with the homeless (3 points).

Anyone with a score of 9 or more should read it.

He is opinionated, with left-wing but often reactionary views. His account of the social changes in Britain over the last fifty years is perceptive and informative. (Some of the ground in the Beyond the Fringe etc reminiscences is covered by Humphrey Carpenter's "Great Silly Grin.") He's very humble and self effacing (but manages, in the nicest most modest way, to drop in stuff about his Oxford scholarship and first class degree, and being offered a knighthood, and how the Prince of Wales liked his play). At the end I felt quite brash and materialistic and arrogant.

Alan Bennett has had a wonderful life. Educated at Oxford as a scholarship boy,he became a medieval scholar, a part of a leading Broadway revue," Beyond the Fringe," an actor, world class playwright and author, He mixes with the rich and famous and yet he is full of insecurities, shy, uncertain about his sexuality , worried about his late maturity,and even questions his talent. The book is stories from different stages of his life written with painful frankness and such humour that you laugh out loud, and yet you wonder about a man who always takes sandwiches on trips, and travels economy class, when he can own a million pound home in London. He seems haunted by his childhood in working class Yorkshire and he brings his Mam and Dad and the rest of the family to life just as much as the more famous names of his adult days. Mr Bennett is never boring never dull. It is hard to put this book down.

I gobbled this book down. It was better than a box of chocolates. For 3 nights I sat on my couch & felt as if I were having a dialogue with a particularly entertaining companion.

I don't quite know how to describe this book in a way that will convey enough information to give you an inking if you would like it or not.

First some description perhaps:

This is a somewhat random collection of writings from one of the premier British playwrights of our time. They vary from reasonably serious such as the introductory story on his father and mother, and the concluding story on his surviving cancer.

Other stories deal with some of the plays he's written. The story of 'The Lady in the Van' is particularly appealing. You see, Mrs. Shepherd drove her van into his garden in 1974 and asked if she could park it there for a while.

'A while' turned out to be fifteen years. And she lived in the van. In 1999 he wrote a play about her that starred Maggie Smith. And the section describing the play is a cross between the story of Mrs. Shepherd (he finds a Mr. Shepherd very hard to imagine) and the writing of the play.

Some dialog from a draft version of the play:

'Mr. Bennett. Will you look under the van?'

'What for?'

'One of these explosive devices. There was another bomb last night and I think I may be next on the list.'

'I can't see anything because of all your plastic bags.'

'Yes and the explosive's plastic so it wouldn't show, possibly. Are there any wires? The wireless tells you to look for wires. Nothing that looks like a timing device?'

'There's an old biscuit tin.'

Rolling on the floor laughing? No. A delight to read? Absolutely.

It's a whopping 600+ page hardcover that's been on my bookshelf for years. Something my lovely wife found, but I'm the first to find time to read it. Amazing how fast he pulled me right in with a great story written extremely well. As I take my time and enjoy its many pages, I have to say it's one of the most honest books you'll ever read. I'm looking forward to getting back to it, but I have to save this book review first. For you.

I don't quite know how to describe this book in a way that will convey enough information to give you an inking if you would like it or not.

First some description perhaps:

This is a somewhat random collection of writings from one of the premier British playwrights of our time. They vary from reasonably serious such as the introductory story on his father and mother, and the concluding story on his surviving cancer.

Other stories deal with some of the plays he's written. The story of 'The Lady in the Van' is particularly appealing. You see, Mrs. Shepherd drove her van into his garden in 1974 and asked if she could park it there for a while.

'A while' turned out to be fifteen years. And she lived in the van. In 1999 he wrote a play about her that starred Maggie Smith. And the section describing the play is a cross between the story of Mrs. Shepherd (he finds a Mr. Shepherd very hard to imagine) and the writing of the play.

Some dialog from a draft version of the play:

'Mr. Bennett. Will you look under the van?'

'What for?'

One of these explosive devices. There was another bomb last night and I think I may be next on the list.'

'I can't see anything because of all your plastic bags.'

'Yes and the explosive's plastic so it wouldn't show, possibly. Are there any wires? The wireless tells you to look for wires. Nothing that looks like a timing device?'

'There's an old biscuit tin.'

Rolling on the floor laughing? No. A delight to read? Absolutely.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author's consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy. "With a writer the life you don't have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access." This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett.

But reading all of Untold Stories, the reader is repeatedly struck by how much of the eventual content of Alan Bennett's perceptive, witty and perspicacious writings has its origins within the four walls of the family home. Many of the values, assumptions, attitudes and standpoints, whose apparently unquestioning adoption by his fictional characters lead the listener to question them, arose from a wider family that feverishly tried to be mundane but, like all families, never achieved that goal. The family was, after all, made up of individuals, each of which had his or her own reality alongside unresolved and often shared misgivings. Thus, immediately, a writer has several lifetimes of real and imagined material.

Alan Bennett, perhaps by virtue of having at least potentially crossed some of the chasms of social class that so profoundly divide British society, seems able to comment, often with no more than an occasional word or phrase, on those tentative but agreed assumptions that make us what we are. "Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound."

But this, despite the authenticity of his flavours, is no minor writer. Not for a moment would anyone wish this writer's passing, but there is no doubt that Alan Bennett's work will live on, probably grow in stature as its ability to comment on the changing Britain of the twentieth century develops a sharper focus.

Essentially Alan Bennett comes across as a conservative type. He dresses and even looks like a 1950s schoolboy, visits churches to describe architectural details of selected tombs in Betjemanesque prose, probably doesn't indulge in fusion cooking, shuns recognition, inhabits the inner city but is perhaps never quite at home there. But then there's the anti-establishment side, the satirist, the overt homosexuality and general anti-bigwig mentality. And all of this from a First at Oxford. "But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar. Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity, but it's better than a timorous toeing of the line."

Untold Stories is a long read, but one which offers a simple yet sophisticated joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett revisits topics he has written about in the past. Miss Shepherd, The Lady In The Van is here, as are his early plays and Beyond The Fringe. So are Talking Heads and The History Boys. But throughout he selects and applies language with much wit and humour to offer apparently ephemeral perspectives on everyday life, perspectives that on reflection are anything but shallow. He is a man of taste, as revealed by his regular revulsion with Classic FM, but he is also an enigma because he keeps listening to it.

Reading Untold Stories is like having an articulate and witty companion come for tea. It stands rereading, nay, it encourages it. My favourite parts are the little nuggets of goodness in the diaries. He talks about how and why, like many of us, he chooses some plates over others: bowls or forks are either friendly or unfriendly, or thick enough to handle the snub. The simple pleasures and obsurdities of human life with all its foibles are here in humourous relief. . . Enjoy

I had read "The Lady in the Van" in the London Review of Books years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly, so I was hoping for more of the same sort. This, however, is typical LRB writing in which the most frequently used pronoun (or indeed, any other word) is "I". The first part of the book, a childhood memoir with much about the author's parents is mildly interesting. The remainder is sheer self-indulgence. So bad I wouldn't even donate it to a library.