Gone With the Windsors [Paperback]

I bought this novel as I am fascinated by the fabulous, horrible creatures that were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I fell in love with this book immediately and have read it several times since that first foray. I found it very witty and full of insight. Graham's writing echoes the social comedies written in the era of the Windsors, shiny and brittle as glass. I highly suggest reading this if you like the Windsor's, the 30's,and the Royal Family.

Laurie Graham has hit a rich seam lately with her series of hilariously insightful novels based on historical events, as observed by lowkey insiders. Gone with the Windsors tells the story of the abdication, through the eyes of Wallis Simpson's Baltimore schoolfriend, Maybell Brumby, now a wealthy widow whose sister Violet has married into the British establishment, offering her an entre in the dustier echelons of London society. The arrival of 'Minnehaha' Warfield, a pushy climber back home, and even more of a pushy climber in London, begins as a drawing room joke between the ex-pat Americans and their English friends, but Mrs Simpson's relentless campaign to scramble her way to the top soon drags Maybell into the domestic centre of an international crisis.

Laurie Graham's brilliance is in making the tiniest details reveal the deepest truths. Maybell's diary is initially just a charming airheaded list of people, cafes and clothes but it soon darkens as the stuffy but respectable Melhuishes, Kents and Yorks are elbowed aside by von Ribbentrops, sleazy opportunist Charlie Bedaux and, more worryingly, HItler himself. By recording the minutiae of the Prince and Mrs Simpson's life in such wearying detail - the callisthenetics, the shopping, the Martinis, the bickering - Graham perfectly conveys the claustrophobic golden cage Wallis builds for herself: the ascent to such lofty social heights is thrilling but there's precious little to do once you're up there. Wallis' growing pretensions to grandeur are amusingly awful, but when the Abdication crisis delivers her worst nightmare - a lifetime with the weak, petulant Prince but no compensatory throne - her hysterical demands reveal an undertone of sheer desperation, clear to the reader, if not Maybell. It's the clever, repeated context of Maybell and Wallis's shared childhood that keeps the reader from forgetting, as Mrs Simpson would like, that this almost-queen was not so long ago an ambitious, insecure charity case from Baltimore, and that trick keeps the sheer chutzpah of Wallis's story fresh. Even though you know what's coming, it's hard not to read with bated breath, hoping against hope that a shaft of sense will break through the Windsors' stifling self-obsession.

Set alongside the candyfloss-brained cocktail set are Maybell's sweet, deaf sister, Doopie, and her friend George Lightfoot, as well as Violet, Melhuish and their children, who provide the moral backbone of the novel, sounding the long, slow notes of real events looming in the background. While Maybell is helping the Prince fritter money on trinkets for Wallis, the Melhuishes are worrying about the political crisis in Germany. Their link with the hunting and shooting establishment allows Graham to depict both sides of the Abdication crisis with considerable sympathy; the Prince of Wales is shown to be scarred by his experiences in the First World War, at the same time as we hear Lightfoot's gentle warnings to Maybell that Hitler is rather more than a congenial host (if 'rather short in the leg').

Gone with the Windsors' real triumph, however, is that Laurie Graham has made Maybell's own story hold its own against the epic love tragedy playing in the background. She's a vividly drawn and likeable character, unwittingly amusing in her naivety, who emerges as a luckier survivor than her grim-faced friend, thanks to her fundamental good nature. The frenzied atmosphere of a society dancing on the brink of disaster is written with delicate skill, and the history seeps through subtly and in a way which underlines the truth that history is about real people, with feelings, ambitions, families and fears, not just dry facts and treaties. That the reader ends feeling rather sorry for the steel-jawed Mrs Simpson, having seen her life through the eyes of a dear friend, is some achievement.

This is an absolute delight. I had never read anything by Laurie Graham before, but I have since been an avid fan. Maybell once knew a girl called Wallace Simpson and, having come to London, looks her up. The book is seen through Maybell's eyes, which don't always get the point but her character gives the book wonderful comic timing. On their own, you can't help feeling that the Prince of Wales (who frankly sounded dreadful) and Mrs Simpson (who frankly sounded worse!) might be more than a little boring. I am sure they are not as awful as Graham painted them, or perhaps they were, but their story as seen from the sidelines is hilarious, although with a tragic feel about it. Mrs Simpson was pure ambition, a woman I feel who wanted to be Queen, not exiled to the Bahama's. When Maybell finally left and went back to her own life, I cheered loudly. Long live Maybell, worthy of a book to herself.