ADAM MARS-JONES published in 1981 a short story, Hooshmi, in which he imagined the Queen in the grip of rabies contracted from an infected corgi, her increasingly erratic behaviour causing intense anxiety to her courtiers.

In The Uncommon Reader, an exquisitely produced jewel of a book, Alan Bennett follows that lead in imagining the Queen in the grip of “la rage”. Not rabies this time, but a distemper even more injurious to the monarchy – the Queen develops a passion for reading.

As for the imagined rabies, the corgis are to blame. Notoriously wayward, they refuse one day to come in when called and the Queen finds them yapping at a large van parked next to the Palace bins. It is the City of Westminster travelling library (sensitive to the demands of verisimilitude, Bennett makes it fall victim to cutbacks as soon as it has served its literary purpose).

Inside this repository of wonders Her Majesty encounters a ginger-haired member of her kitchen staff named Norman Seakins, taking out a book by Cecil Beaton.

“Now that one is here, I suppose one ought to borrow a book,” the Queen hazards, making off with a random volume of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which she finds hard going. Returning it the following week, she lights upon The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford.

The feathery frivolity of Mitford’s prose proves extraordinarily subversive, infecting the Queen with a late-onset rage for reading during which, abetted by Norman, she sets about making up for all the time that she has wasted in not reading, devouring the contents of the London Library, graduating from Mitford to the Scott-Moncrieff Proust, which she settles down to read during a particularly damp summer visit to Balmoral.

The Establishment is appalled. The Queen appears abstracted while on her public duties and insists on introducing literature into inappropriate contexts, such as her Christmas broadcast. So eccentric is her behaviour (asking the French President his opinion of Jean Genet at a State Banquet, ringing up the Archbishop of Canterbury to talk about the Bible while he is watching Strictly Come Dancing) that the palace staff begin to wonder if she is suffering from Alzheimer’s. In fact, she is suffering from the access of humanity that is an invariable side effect of reading.

Her Private Secretary, the Prime Minister and his foul-mouthed special adviser naturally decide that they must put an peremptory end to this intolerable state of affairs. Norman vanishes, as does a consignment of books intended to accompany Her Majesty on a visit to Canada.

The Queen, unstoppable by now, meets the author Alice Munro at a reception (finding her much more congenial than a rebarbative group of British writers for whom she gives a soirée, at which they boorishly ignore her), and borrows a novel from her. Nothing can prevail against the power of literature – not even, it seems, Her Majesty’s notoriously scrupulous sense of duty . . .

Such is the charm of this book – the elegant typeface, pretty endpapers and deceptively comforting prose – that it would be easy to mistake it for a gentle jeu d’esprit; one of those wry, melancholy slivers of observation at which Bennett excels. It isn’t though.

Beneath the tasteful gilt-and-beige cover seethes a savagely Swiftian indignation against stupidity, Philistinism and arrogance in public places, and a passionate argument for the civilising power of art. We don’t know if the Queen cares, in real life, for reading. Whether she does or not, she might find herself amused and instructed by The Uncommon Reader.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennet

Profile, £10.99; 160pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £9.89 (free p&p)

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