‘Abdication’: A ho-hum novel of Wallis and Edward
It can be a tricky negotiation to set a novel inside real and relatively recent historic events about which contemporary people still have strong feelings. When the real event involves British royals, long unwilling to let daylight in to ruin their magic, it takes an adept novel to maneuver around the obstacles thrown up to mask the truth.
Abdication, by Juliet Nicolson, is not that adept. Which is surprising because Nicolson is an established writer of histories (The Perfect Summer) and the descendant of Bloomsbury literary icons Nigel Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West (the poet famous for her passionate affair with writer Virginia Woolf). Yet Abdication, Nicolson's debut novel, reads almost amateurish. The invented characters are unpersuasive, the dialogue is stilted, plot points contrived, narration clunky. You press on, if only to once again read the inevitable, and pathetic, denouement you know is ahead.
The year is 1936, the place is Britain, the old king, George V, is dead, the new king is his son, Edward VIII, who is handsome, glamorous and charismatic but comes to the throne still unmarried at age 42. "After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in 12 months," his grumpy father predicted. And sure enough, he did, abdicating his throne in a huff in December, when told he can't marry his plain, 40-year-old, twice-divorced American lover, Wallis Simpson, and make her his queen. Imagine that.
The story is familiar, thanks to scores of history books, memoirs, novels and movies, including recent additions to the canon. Nicolson tells it again through invented characters from across the pond: Middle-aged American spinster Evangeline Nettlefold, a fictional girlhood friend of Wallis' from Baltimore, comes to visit her English godmother and gets caught up in the drama. Then there is May Thomas, a young woman raised on a Barbados sugar plantation, whose café-au-lait beauty suggests an exotic past and whose knowledge of cars lands her a chauffeur position with the godmother's husband. He's a member of the government that persuades the press lords to keep the king's affair out of the papers until the day he quits, leaving ordinary Brits reeling in shock.
There are more characters, real and imagined, but in the end, you wonder about the point. Few characters are appealing, least of all Wallis and Edward, who remain enigmas in this novel and to this day. Thankfully, Nicolson rejects the romantic claptrap that has long enveloped the abdication, depicting the Wallis-Edward relationship as the twisted, ambivalent mess that it was.
Maybe the most pertinent point of Abdication is that it shows how misplaced deference to royal secrets by the press can backfire badly, especially on the monarchy. The British media have learned that lesson all too well, much to the chagrin of Edward VIII's successors.