Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward

It seems odd to me that Noel Coward wrote something in 1960. To me, he seems hermetically sealed within the 1930s. As it happens, he lived until 1973. but it’s still quite bizarre to read a novel by Coward – I think perhaps his only novel, though the internet is proving cagey on that – in which Elizabeth II is on the throne.

Pomp and Circumstance is set in the fictional British island colony of Samolo, somewhere in the South Pacific, and the ex-part dignitaries are preparing for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Perhaps it isn’t too big a spoiler to say that the novel ends before they turn up – this is all about the preparation, which must take place in the midst of the island’s other events, secrets, and gossip.

The narrator is the bizarrely named Grizel Craigie, an official’s wife who is used to the ex-pat community of upper-class Brits who’ve grown used to living a fairly luxurious life in a fairly insignificant place. The dinner parties, social niceties, and hierarchies of England have all been exported to this island – which does, indeed, feel rather like it is living in an era two or more decades earlier. Whether this is because Coward is holding the pen or because it is an accurate portrait of this sort of community in 1960, I have no idea.

Their lives revolve around Government House, which is described in the opening lines of the novel:

There’s no use pretending that, architecturally, Government House has anything to recommend it at all because it hasn’t; it is quite agreeable inside with nice airy rooms and deep-set verandas, but outside it is unequivocally hideous. Viewed from any aspect it looks like a gargantuan mauve blanc-mange. It was built in the early nineteen hundreds after the old one had burned down and nobody knows why it should have been painted mauve in the first place or why it should always have been repainted mauve since.

Again, it might be 1960, but any Edwardian comic writer could have written that paragraph.

The novel starts with a neighbourly dispute about children, and there is something of the Provincial Lady in the way that Grizel attempts to manage her husband, her neighbours, their respective children, and somewhere in the middle of it all lies the truth of what happened. But this is just scene setting before she hears the news that Her Majesty is on her way – and news spreads like wildfire across the island. Well, again, the ex-pat community. We here surprisingly little from or about native Somoloans, and it’s about as racially insensitive as you might imagine whenever they are mentioned. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as the worst you can imagine, but certainly any 21st-century editor would put a red pen through a lot of it.

But Grizel can’t dwell on this for too long – because a different visitor is coming before the royals arrive: Eloise, the Duchess of Fowey. She has a longstanding affair with a man called Bunny, and Grizel is called upon to try and keep their affair secret by officially housing Eloise. Reluctantly, Grizel agrees.

When Eloise does come, there is all manner of fun with clandestine meetings and ‘sleepovers’, the spread of scarlet fever that puts paid to these plans, and a diabetic nurse who cheerfully tells people to force sugar into mouth, however much she protests, if she has an episode.

There are a lot of typically Cowardian elements in Pomp and Circumstance, from elaborate set pieces to immoral people being wittily frank about their immorality. Grizel is an entertaining narrator, caught between callousness and social decency, and endlessly frustrated with the admittedly frustrating people around her. But mostly Pomp and Circumstance shows how good Coward was at plays…

While there are some funny lines and situations, and the prospect of a royal arrival is a fun idea to throw the island into a frenzy, there is an awful lot of padding in the novel. It moves with glacial slowness, and often dozens of pages would pass without anything of note happening, or the same conversations happening again and again in slightly different ways. There must be some reason that this became a novel rather than a play, but it feels as though there is only a play’s worth of words at the centre of this much-longer book. The rest is rather surplus to requirements.

So, I enjoyed reading certain sections, and the opening paragraph gave me hope that it would be a silly delight. In the end, it was more of a slog to get between amusing moments. I will say that the end is a delight, with the sort of momentum I’d hoped for throughout, but it’s a long way to go for that pay-off. On the whole, I don’t think it much matters if you stick to seeing Coward on stage.