The Prince of Wales: A Biography by Jonathan Dimbleby Little Brown $340 Princess in Love by Anna Pasternak Bloomsbury $195 ASIDE from the fact that almost every potential reader has an opinion about each of these books before so much as opening the cover, on the face of it they are worlds apart.
One, a meticulously researched biography, is written in great detail and at great length (566 footnoted pages, plus appendices) with the aid of tens of thousands of pages of diaries, documents and letters provided by its subject. His friends have been interviewed at length, sources are acknowledged. The other, a salacious work of little literary merit, is not so much a biography of its subject as the story of a love affair, recounted in soap-romance style as the emotive, over-wrought even, tale of star-crossed lovers.
But closer inspection reveals much common ground: each has revealed not only to readers but, through world-wide serialisation, extracts and headline news, to the public at large, details of the private lives of the Prince of Wales and his estranged wife that had previously been mostly the subject of gossip and speculation.
Here, for the first time, is confirmation that the Prince of Wales had not one, but three affairs with Camilla Parker Bowles. And here, the man the world suspected of having an affair with the prince's wife, not only tells the world that's so, but laces the revelations with juicy detail.
The reasons behind both works warrant examination - and they have unpleasant similarities. Although they are the work of writers of entirely different calibre, the interest in each of these books is not so much how it says it, but what it says.
Here are two very different attempts by bitter and wounded men to win the sought-after approval of that amorphous and fickle suitor, the general public.
