I admit there were times when reading Untold Story by Monica Ali made me feel like I was peeping through a telephoto camera lens, rummaging through a celeb's garbage or even (echoes of the News of the World scandal) listening to a wiretapped conversation. I'm not passing judgment on Ali's decision to write a "what if Princess Diana hadn't died in that Paris tunnel?" novel; one that instead imagined the late Princess of Wales faking her own death, undergoing plastic surgery and taking up residence in a Midwestern town where she has a circle of friends, a boyfriend, and helps out at the local dog shelter. But reading this, I couldn't help wondering about the taste factor: the woman has been dead for more than a decade, and now all the folks who fueled the papparazzi frenzy that contributed to some of the problems she faced in life are all going to flock to this book. It's the same way I feel when I succumb to the urge to pick up a copy of People magazine at the drugstore register: I know that in some ways I'm being used by the PR people to the stars, but it's kind of distasteful to think that the only reason I might read a story is because of the involvement of some kind of well-known figure.
That's the kind of feeling this book instilled in me -- and the narrative itself wasn't good enough to quell that sense of unease, alas. Hey, it's a guaranteed winner of a concept from a marketing perspective: every Diana fan who laid wreaths for her is going to want to at least read this for themselves, whether they love or loathe Ali's imagined future for her. But I think it's a bit sad that the author of the acclaimed Brick Lane (once described as one of the most talented British young writers around) resorted to this kind of stunt fiction. Because ultimately, that's what this book has going for it: the quirky concept.
In Ali's vision, Princess Diana enlists the help of a key aide to vanish from her real life; her body is never found and a new woman, Lydia, begins a new life in the United States. When we meet her, she has been three months in the small community of Kensington (yes, nudge, wink...) in the US midwest, and she has carved out a life for herself. She feels the pain of the loss of her sons every day, but she has ceased to fear being exposed. Perhaps she has become too relaxed, for into town wanders, by chance, one of the photographers who for years studied every detail of her face and knows it better than nearly anyone in the world.
To be fair to Ali's novel, she creates a real tension in this part of the story: will Grabowski the photographer identify Diana/Lydia? If he does, will the former princess seize the opportunity to make a miraculous comeback in order to see her children again? Will she find a way to outwit him? But that's pretty much the only part of the book that really worked for me (although at least that made the final third or so more of a page-turner.) Most of the characters are flat or at best two-dimensional, engaging in tedious dialog and situations; discussions about clothes and boyfriends blah blah blah. Ali comes back over and over and over again to the way that Lydia/Diana never confides in Carson, her new lover. The same few themes are harped on endlessly. What I found most annoying -- and potentially most offensive to many -- was the retroactive diagnosis of the real-life Diana's behavior. Sure, it was refreshing that Ali didn't succumb to the temptation to do craft a kind of hagiography, but I couldn't help imagining how offended Diana's sons and close friends might be by this. And I'd have the same reaction if it was anyone who wasn't royal -- imagine someone writing a fictional version of the young Salt Lake City girl, Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped and held as a kind of sex slave for years, without the subject's input or consent? At some point, that becomes almost a violation of privacy, even when the person is a public figure and dead, to boot.
I kept wishing that Ali had taken the approach chosen by John Burnham Schwartz in his excellent novel, The Commoner, about the plight of a fictionalized crown princess of Japan. In that novel, the author is obviously drawing on both the experiences of the current Crown Princess Masako, who has battled fertility woes and depression, as well as the current Empress Michiko, who faced her own problems when she became the first real commoner to marry into the imperial family in the 1950s. And yet while the parallels are there for an informed reader to see, the characters he creates are fictional beings. Like Ali, he ventures off into fantasyland when it comes time to resolve his story, and a lot of readers found his solution unconvincing, but I didn't finish reading the book with the same feeling of having trespassed on the private thoughts of another human being -- even if dressed up in fictional fancy dress. (It didn't hurt that John Burnham Schwartz is a stronger writer, despite the occasional lapse into exoticism, predictable observations about Japan and purple prose.) For me, this was a solid 4-star book, one that blended the real and the fictional to the point that the reader thought only about the story being recounted on the page, not as if they were being asked to chuckle knowingly about the real life parallels.
But after finishing Untold Story, I not only felt uneasy but also puzzled. What has happened to Monica Ali? After writing one acclaimed novel, she wrote an indifferent series of shorter, linked works that I couldn't even finish, Alentejo Blue, followed by a rather overwrought and overdone novel, In the Kitchen, the main interest of which lay in its portrayal of the underclass of immigrants who toil invisibly in the London's global hub. And now this novel, to which I'd struggle to award even three stars. This felt like slightly elevated chick lit, at best; or chick lit with a twist. From writing a book that was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize to this? Surely a novelist of the caliber she displayed in Brick Lane has enough of an imagination to come up with something on her own, without prowling through the debris of someone elses's life? Just as I felt like washing my hands after I finished the book, I feel like asking the real Monica Ali to stand up, please.
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