Untold Story

Untold Story: A Novel by Monica Ali
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Try to envision a typical woman’s summer beach book written by the sort of author whose novels get nominated for literary prizes. There you have Untold Story, written by Monica Ali, whose Brick Lane, a novel about the lives of Bengali immigrants in London, was shortlisted for the Booker.

Ali’s new novel is a sort of alternative history wherein Princess Diana does not die in the auto accident in Paris (the car swerves a few yards further on when it has cleared the tunnel.) However, her mental health, as we now know, having been increasingly precarious for the last few years of her life, she decides to fake her own death and remake herself as a middle-class English divorcee living in the middle of the US (I assume Iowa.)

She has the help of her private secretary, who makes all the arrangements: moves money into secret accounts, locates a place where she can go swimming off her yacht and disappear, rents a bungalow in Brazil where she can live while having plastic surgery to disguise her distinctive face. His part in the deception is narrated in his diary a year after they have accomplish the disappearance, and it is one of the best parts of the book.

We find Lydia living in a small town called Kensington, which she has chosen for its irony, having made friends with three or four women, without sharing with them her real background. She has a boyfriend who is increasingly restless because of her extreme reserve about her past. And, alas, she has a paparazzo who has stumbled onto her by accident while trying to put together a 10th anniversary memoir of his years chasing her, from when she was shy Di to when she disappeared.

So, we have a clever story, good for a few chuckles and a bit of suspense, leading obviously to bonding between the women and a cooperative attempt to deceive the photographer. There is some depth in the character of Lydia and of the woman she works for at the local animal shelter, and a good deal of ultimately unconvincing angst at having left her children, never to see them again. What possessed Monica Ali to waste her talent writing such a book?

2011 No 111