An alternative life for Diana

In creating a story about Diana's escape from public life, Monica Ali has allowed Diana herself to escape from the novel.

Like many women of my generation, I count the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles as one of my most vivid early memories. I was five when it occurred, and I rose at dawn to watch it on a black-and-white television with my family. I was so captivated by the grandeur – the billowing dress with its 25-foot train, the horse-drawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace – that I asked my parents what steps I myself might take in order to marry a prince. It wouldn’t be possible, they informed me, because we weren’t Episcopalians.

Sixteen years later, after Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris, I rose again at dawn to watch her funeral. I had graduated from college a few months earlier and was interning as a reporter in North Carolina. In the days and weeks that followed the funeral, I’d drive around a city I didn’t really know in a newly acquired second-hand car, and whenever “Candle in the Wind 1997” came on the radio, I’d burst into tears. I have, of course, heard the argument that the death of a pampered, neurotic woman famous for being pretty as much as for anything else was not exactly tragic — but isn’t there room in the world for many kinds of tragedies?

All of which is to say that for someone like me, the idea behind Monica Ali’s new novel, Untold Story, is irresistible: what if, Ali asks, Diana had survived that accident? What if she had faked her own death and gone to live under an assumed name in America? Such a premise immediately achieves two things. It corrects the heartbreaking error of Diana’s early death, and it creates, at least for American readers, the delicious fantasy that there could be a princess among us.

Unfortunately, the premise is the best part of Untold Story. There is no pleasure in criticising a writer as talented as Ms Ali, who won many fans with her terrific first novel, Brick Lane, which follows, over several decades, a woman who emigrates from Bangladesh to London for an arranged marriage. But somehow Untold Story has come out all wrong.

In creating a story about Diana’s escape from public life, Ms Ali has allowed Diana herself to escape from the novel. Ms Ali never uses the name “Diana”; the main character calls herself Lydia Snaresbrook. And because Lydia is a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs, Ali has written a novel about a willfully bland woman living in the suburbs. Diana’s contradictions – that she was a vain clotheshorse who also fought seriously against land mines and reached out to those with AIDS, that she was extremely visible yet desperately lonely, that she was needy and endearing and charming and difficult all at once – are nowhere in these pages.

The most interesting part of “Lydia’s” tale, how she faked her death, is 10 years past when the novel opens in April 2007. Lydia is now a dark-haired 40-something living in the Midwestern American town of Kensington. Ms Ali is deliberately vague about the location of Kensington, another choice that doesn’t serve the novel, but it’s an affluent place where Lydia has bought a house with a pool and taken a job at a kennel, is dating a nice guy who wants to know more about her past and has acquired a triad of American girlfriends. Like Lydia’s boyfriend, the women have no idea of her real identity.

But someone might be on to her. A grizzled paparazzo named Grabowski, a relic from Lydia’s old life, is in the US working on a book of photos to be released on the 10th anniversary of her death. By a not particularly believable coincidence, he ends up staying at a B & B in Kensington. After he recognises Lydia’s “mesmerisingly beautiful” blue eyes (she stopped wearing brown contacts a few years back), a cat-and-mouse game ensues. Though Grabowski thinks frequently of how huge the media storm will be if Lydia is in fact Diana, it doesn’t feel huge.

In certain sections, Ms Ali offers glimpses of the better, richer novel this could have been. She allots a few chapters to the 1998 diary entries of Lawrence Standing, a fictional private secretary and adviser, dying of a brain tumour, who helped Diana fake her own demise and was the only person who knew of her plan. Subsequently, we read Lydia’s unsent letters to Lawrence during the early years of her new life.

Among the real details Ms Ali invokes in this fictitious work is the most memorable and saddest image from Diana’s funeral: the card that sat in a bouquet of white flowers atop her casket, inscribed with the single handwritten word “Mummy.” For those of us who are perhaps too blithe in our observation of public figures, the card was a powerful reminder of what this novel struggles to convey — that, like all icons, Diana was a person, too.

UNTOLD STORY
Monica Ali 
Scribner, 259 pages; $25

©2011 The New York Times News Service