The Tale of the King of Buen Consejo (Part The Second)
© 2006 William Shepherd
The Germans have a literary genre they call a Staatsroman - a state novel. These are exercises in literary fiction for the purpose of illuminating the implications of a social theory. This is one reason they were much more receptive to John Seymour's Retrieved from the Future than the English. But we can do it too. G.K. Chesterton did it with The Napoleon of Notting Hill for instance and nobody come more English than the Chester-Bellocs and Distributism.
For the past 15 years I have had a dream of devoting a third of each year writing, another third microbusinessing...I used to call it money-making but this is more realistic...and the other third doing whatever else takes my fancy which before my partner died in 2002 was sailing the ocean blue. High on my writing agenda is The King of Buen Consejo by William Shepherd. I rather like this king of mine so rather than abandon him I thought I would tell his full life story.
My tale will be in four parts. In the first part I will change the ending to Shaw’s Apple Cart. The election goes ahead, ballots are rigged, the king loses, a republic is declared and the king is sent to St. Anne’s at the head of a company of the King’s Cavalry...his gaolers...to put down the Alderney insurgency. This is a temporary expedient as you cannot have an ex-king and his pretty young queen...complete with a social conscience and charity work among the downtrodden...running around all over the place. They become pretenders and ferment Royalist Rebellions.
Unfortunately for the Government the king takes a leaf out of Mark Twain’s book about the Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, goes among his people in disguise, joins the rebels and is bought off by some splendid titles and the promise of independence for the Confederation of Channel Island States.
After their victory the king will be given a year or two to be footloose and fancy-free among the idle rich while conditions back home deteriorate...republics normally last a decade before imploding. They will appear in popular pamphlets like Tassler and OY! in a before and after story, go to fashion shows and hobnob with celebrities in Paris and Boston. The second part of the books ends with our queen having a passionate love affair and leaving the king.As a man I will really go to town in the third part showing that men can be hurt too...even big men cry.
In the first part of the book a daughter will have been invented doing good deeds in undeveloped foreign parts...a Priestley character from Festival in Farbridge campaigning against the Arms Race. She returns home, finds Daddy moping around the house, tells him to pull himself together and get a life and drags him off to British Imperial India.
Here she leaves him to his own devices to make the best of it...without any money. From time to time he bumps into his old cronies and is almost rumbled but keeps his promise to himself and his daughter to stay disguised for three years. We don't need to stop there. In the best Anthony Adverse manner we could arrange a stay with Benjamin Franklin's son in New Jersey followed by a trip to the Mayan pyramids in the company of a Jesuit priest with an inside line to the urator of the Vatican's secret hoard of sacred South American books. There was real substance in those 'polite preliminaries about the effect of cannons and gunpowder on the climate'.
Meanwhile the reader will be given the first inkling that lust is lapsing and all is not well with the queen. She will need a good friend to help her know herself better...Hetty Clarkson in Edwina Curry's novel Chasing Men is the type I have in mind.
In the third part the king gradually acquires a social conscience and gathers the facts upon which his social conscience can go to work. Meanwhile the queen's world falls apart. She retreats back into her rural retreat, goes organic and starts to read books...something that was alien to her before.
Her daughter...a Jane Austen heroine...now turns her counselling skills onto her mother. She takes her out to see George Bernard Shaw's plays and gets her reading political tracts like The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and J.B.Priestley's plays and novels...with the help of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. Gradually the queen acquires ideas better suited to her husband's former station...and to the king’s own improving consciousness.
A Bildnungsroman within a Staatsroman. Value for money if ever I saw it. Buy one get one free.
At the end of the third part of the book the queen's daughter contrives a reconciliation between her mother and father...and together they sketch out a cunning plan to enable the king to reclaim his throne. I'm not going to tell you the fourth part. But I have it all worked out. I believe in happy endings...and I have my Queen-in-Waiting.
first published on 15th August 2006.
