Book review: Waiting for Princess Margaret

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 12:42

Waiting for Princess Margaret Emma Tennant Quartet, 152pp, £12 Review by LESLEY MCDOWELL

WHICH of us really knows where we have come from? That's the essential theme of this third volume of memoirs from Emma Tennant. The series began with the sparkling, suggestive Strangers and continued with Girlitude, an evocation of the rapidly disappearing, debutante world of the 1950s and the emerging democratic, bohemian one of the 1960s. Her aristocratic family and upbringing in Scotland have inevitably loomed large. But it's this third volume that really tackles the thorny question of family legacy and who we think we are.

Tennant's is the kind of writing whose playful veneer hides troublesome and troubling thoughts. Her novel about the Queen, which came out in 2007, similarly asked uncomfortable questions while positing them in a light-hearted framework; her historical novels, which often form prequels or sequels to famous literary works, are playful while simultaneously questioning the status and intentions of those stories. Questioning authority, never making assumptions, is perhaps her natural inheritance, as the daughter of the second wife of Christopher Tennant, once Lord Glenconner. Growing up in a house that would be passed on to her half-brother, with one foot in a glamorous, privileged world and the other foot firmly out of it, she is forever on the threshold.

But the threshold, while often a painful place to be for a teenage girl, is, as this volume shows, also a fruitful place for a writer. When Christopher Tennant's title passed to the eldest son of his first marriage, Colin Tennant, so did the land, in this case, Glen, the baronial Peeblesshire mansion where Emma Tennant grew up alongside her half-siblings. At the beginning of the memoir it is 1990, and she is being told that an unlikely, distant relative is laying claim to Glen – a woman. This is surprising as the land in entailed to the male line.

What anchors the anxieties about legacy and inheritance in this volume, though, is the impending surprise visit to Glen of the young Princess Margaret one summer in 1955, and it is to this time that Tennant repeatedly returns. It appears that Colin Tennant has been romancing her, or at least that is what the teenage Emma understands by the whispers and half-heard phrases. A rumour that his father has taken Colin aside and told him, "You can still back out of it," persists around the house.

Is Colin going to propose to Princess Margaret? Is the Tennant family going to have to get used to dealing with royal in-laws? The lack of luxury at Glen, a house rarely heated and, it would seem, sparsely furnished, would suggest that that connection might prove tricky to handle.

But this book is about legacies, not social advancement. As Tennant weaves in memories from this summer along with her own investigation about a possible missing relative, a boy who may or may not have belonged to her grandmother, we come to understand that the question is not "why would Colin want to marry Princess Margaret?" but "why would Princess Margaret want to marry Colin?" Tennant has fun with the image of this young woman whose back "is as plump and padded with pale flesh as the game birds that are set down in front of her". What does her presence in this baronial house have to say about legacies and inheritances?

In 2007 a middle-aged man who claims to be Princess Margaret's illegitimate son appeals to be allowed access to her will. Paternity, wrote James Joyce, is a legal fiction. But there are ways for maternity to be a legal fiction: the child who may or may not have belonged to Tennant's grandmother disappears from the paper trail, too.

How do we establish who we are? By knowing where we have come from. Tennant's beautifully constructed memoir shows her love of the postmodern muddying of roots, of sources.

Nothing is written in stone, not a classic novel, a birth certificate or the passing on of property. Everything is up for grabs, everything is as malleable as a young girl's confused perceptions of close family events.

Tennant, who was first published at the same time as those others at the vanguard of the postmodern treatment of historical fiction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Fowles, has written her memoir to read like a postmodern novel. At a time when so many novels seem to favour more traditional, linear treatments and offer pat assurances, this is greatly to be treasured.