The author isn’t the David Mitchell who writes sententious novels like Cloud Atlas. This is the one who sports a beard to camouflage his weak chin and has made a successful career as an actor, comedian, and TV and radio show personality. Apparently, he also writes a weekly column for The Observer, which is one of numerous newspapers I don’t read. I like him. He’s quick-witted and eloquent and especially outstanding playing Shakespeare in Ben Elton’s sitcom, Upstart Crow.

 

As it happens, the Bard is going to play a small part in this history book which is about England’s monarchs from King Arthur (who didn’t exist) to Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign ushered in the Renaissance and a degree of unprecedented national self-consciousness. “Before Shakespeare the Renaissance didn’t hugely affect England,” Mitchell tells us. “It was like a copy of French Vogue in a Guildford hairdressers — just something that people who wanted to be aware of things were aware of.” (I’ve read that second sentence about six times now and still don’t really understand it.)

 

One of my friends in the book club said that Unruly was like Horrible Histories for adults. Mitchell wants to make us laugh out loud and think profound thoughts simultaneously (well, at least by the time we reach the acknowledgements on page 406). Its intention is to comedically subvert the pomposity of academic discourse. For the first quarter of the text I really struggled with his jokey, blokey, irreverent tone of voice. He seemed to be trying too desperately hard to be funny. There are numerous puns, expletives, hyperboles and digressions. And worst of all, a wearying puerile self-referencing. Here is a typical example, relating to a section about Offa’s Dyke: “An offa you can’t refuse,” he subtitles it. “Boom! I’ve dropped the pun. I couldn’t help it. It’s been hanging over me all chapter.”

 

Some of his jokes work reasonably well, many others fall as flat as the Offa’s Dyke gag or worse. It struck me early on that this book would have made a much better radio comedy series, say 10 by 15-minute episodes with an 11pm transmission time – when listeners are too tired or pissed to pay too much critical attention and just waiting for Morpheus to whisk them into dreamland. I made it to William the Conqueror just about before losing patience and dumping it. Then about ten days later I came across it by accident languishing in the toilet and found the text, for some reason, helped to loosen my constipated bowels. In particular, I happened upon a riff about the 2021 James Bond movie, No Time To Die, which Mitchell went to see in a swanky cinema just after the nation emerged from a Covid lockdown. How does he segue from William I to Bond, you ask? Easy. Both men exploded. “I was fucking furious,” Mitchell declares and launches into an apoplectic rant about this Hollywood “creative misstep.”

 

So I became converted to the fact Unruly did after all have a purpose in my life, either as a laxative or a coffee table comforter when nothing half-decent was on the telly.

 

Mitchell may be trying too hard to be blokey and scatologically funny, but he has a serious side – so his Oxbridge education was not entirely wasted. The early monarchs were ruthless gangsters and entitled chancers who brutally wielded their power and came to believe in the myth that they were the divine instruments of God, that there was something intrinsically special about their royal lineage. And this is the fantasy that we the English have internalized. He quotes Shakespeare’s hollow crown speech from the play Richard II. That king was “a colossal twat,” Mitchell alleges, but the Bard endows him here with a dignity and self-knowledge that in reality he didn’t get within a million miles of attaining.

 

Mitchell has developed a soft spot for the Bard. He modestly admits that in under 200 words the hollow crown speech “says as much about the nature of kingship as I have managed in the rest of this book.” He concludes that the rulers commemorated are “as inconsequential as the biographical specifics of a burglar who has been enabled to take all your stuff by lax security, poor law enforcement and a grim socio-economic environment… They were not important, unlike Shakespeare.”

 

It’s a nice way to end, with the jokey blokey facade finally abandoned. For this relief much thanks!