Book review: Abdication

By DOUGLAS OSLER
Published on 28/07/2012 00:00

It must be liberating for a professional historian to break loose from the rigours of research and write a novel based on historical fact but allowing scope for imagination.

Abdication

By Juliet Nicolson

Bloomsbury, 361pp, £16.99

Juliet Nicolson has done this in her first novel, telling the story of Edward VIII’s relationship with Wallis Simpson through the eyes of Evangeline Nettlefold, Wallis’ bitter school friend.

The novel opens with her first visit to Fort Belvedere, “the country home of a middle-aged man and his married mistress”. She is unmarriageable, wears unstable wigs, is outrageously fat – and even mismanages her revenge on Edward and Wallis for their neglect of her when the opportunity comes to tell all to the British public.

Insights into the political machinations around the abdication are provided by May Thomas, who has left an abusive, plantation-owner father in Barbados, and come to Britain with her brother, Sam. May becomes chauffeur and secretary to the government chief whip and hence privy to secret information, much of which finds its way into her diary. That is valuable as “the upper classes, and royalty in particular, had an entrenched antipathy to telling the truth”.

May and Sam are welcomed by their cousin when they arrive in London. Nat has married into a Jewish family, and Nicolson shades in the background of the anti-Jewish riots encouraged by Oswald Mosley’s New Party and frequently overlooked in the history of Britain in the late 1930s. Edward’s fascination with Hitler and widespread aristocratic support for fascism are similarly woven into the story.

Real and created characters are mixed so credibly, readers might wonder which is which. Nicholson brings the past alive with the panache one would expect from such a fine social historian. The story moves with all the elegance of the Chief Whip’s Rolls Royce, and if the ending is predictable, that doesn’t make it less interesting.