Book review: The Windsor Faction, by D.J. Taylor

by D.J. Taylor
Chatto & Windus
3.5 stars
Mark Lawson

The pivotal moments of history bring gains and losses. If Edward VIII had given up Wallis Simpson and avoided abdication in 1936, his stammering brother would not have succeeded him, meaning we would never have seen that fine movie, The King's Speech.

And, in that alternate universe, books would presumably be imagining what might have happened if the king had married his mistress and given up the throne. In our world, however, in his 11th novel D.J. Taylor does the reverse.

The Windsor Faction starts with a tremendous prologue, set in December 1936, the month of the abdication. In Taylor's world, journalists await the arrival of the king at the funeral of his mistress, who has died during a botched appendectomy. It's smart of Taylor to avoid the more obvious anti-history, in which Edward puts royal duty before love. The monarch becomes a pseudo-widower and the tragedy helps Taylor with the dilemma he addresses in an afterword: the morality of attributing views and actions to historical figures in circumstances that never occurred - in this version, Edward's involvement in a pacifist conspiracy to keep Britain out of the second world war.

The author is a talented pasticheur and several sections of the book entertainingly channel the narrative styles of Anthony Powell, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh. This prose-karaoke is at its best, though, in the chapters that adopt the voice of the camp, grand, gossipy diaries of real-life popular journalist Beverley Nichols.

In the latter part of the book, as Nichols - in a cute allusion to The King's Speech - is hired to pen Edward's Christmas address, and the antiwar conspiracy mounts, there are set-piece scenes that equal the Simpson funeral.