From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Trouble at the Palace?
Head to the Colonies.
Mark Helprin sweetly satirizes the British royal family.
With "Freddy and Fredericka," the novelist Mark Helprin has produced a clever farce about the British royal family. Which raises the question: Who needs fiction to deal with these sad clowns? For two generations now, they have parodied themselves far above our poor power to add or detract. Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, young Prince Harry, the weight-watching Duchess of York, that flutter-headed glitterata Princess Diana: To think about them for more than even a moment is to find yourself clutching your head and muttering in pain, "How long, O Lord, how long?"
Except--well, except that a novelist's comic impulse sometimes runs in unpredictable directions. You expect satire to contain exaggerated characters let loose in an accurately reported world. But it is almost impossible to exaggerate the foibles of the Windsors. In "Freddy and Fredericka," the accurate reporting is the inane behavior of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The satire is of a world that no longer recognizes what royalty is or why anyone might ever need a king. Mr. Helprin has used the worst aspects of the British royal family to construct one last grand defense of the whole idea of monarchy.
"Though it is hard to be a king, it is harder yet to become one," the novel opens. That is a lesson the title characters--stand-ins for the real-life Charles and Diana--will learn all too well. Freddy is everything one could want in a prince of Wales: an athletic horseman and fencer, a well-read and thoughtful student of political science, a kindly and dedicated man married to a beautiful and aristocratic wife. Unfortunately, he is also quite insane, and if his idiotic wife didn't wear clothes that invariably showed her perfect bosom as though it were being "carried on a tray before her," the drooling British press would notice that she is nearly as insane as he is.
But the royal family has an ace up its sleeve. To deal with the public-relations disaster of Freddy and Fredericka, the queen summons the immortal wizard Merlin, secret adviser to the throne since the days of King Arthur. Sure enough, Merlin has a solution: Let the prince and princess prove themselves by trying to reclaim the colonies lost by the last insane king, George III. And so off the hapless couple go, parachuted into New Jersey in a hopeless, picaresque attempt to conquer America.
Charles Dickens once mocked authors (such as Anthony Trollope's mother, Frances) who pandered to their British readers by writing scathing books about America. But when his own novel "Martin Chuzzlewit" started to lose popularity in its serial publication, Dickens promptly sent the title character off to the U.S.--so he could ridicule those silly Americans for the pleasure of his Victorian audience. From the moment Freddy and Fredericka land in the industrial fields of New Jersey with nothing to wear but their parachutes, Mr. Helprin uses broad slapstick to parody every distinctly American folly of language and society that comes into his view.
And yet, even here, the satirical aim of "Freddy and Fredericka" is turned a little upside-down. As the prince and princess travel the country cleaning toilets, stealing art and pretending to be dentists from a state whose name they can't pronounce, they are slowly taught something about themselves and other people. And when at last they are released from an insane asylum to join an American political campaign--Freddy nearly becomes president--the novel proclaims its genuine admiration for the world that people have built in the long-lost colonies. "Freddy and Fredericka" doesn't parody the awful aspects of American culture, for those, too, are beyond parody. The book takes aim instead at a world that can no longer recognize as truly grand the enormous madness and energy of that strange country called America.
There is a peculiar rule of literature that the most brutal satires seem to be written by conservatives, or at least out of a conservative impulse. Think of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," or Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies," or Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" or Tom Sharpe's "The Throwback." With his lyrical prose and epic imagination in such books as "Winter's Tale," "A Soldier of the Great War," "Memoir From Antproof Case" and last year's "The Pacific and Other Stories," Mr. Helprin has proved himself a major fiction writer--and perhaps the only one of his generation it is plausible to call a genuine conservative.
But for all that, "Freddy and Fredericka" is far from brutal. Mr. Helprin's first full novel in a decade, it is, in the end, a rather sweet book about kings and queens and why human beings might sometimes need them. About America, as well, and why human beings might sometimes need it, too.
Mr. Bottum is the editor of the journal First Things. You can buy "Freddy and Fredericka" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
