I’m a new author, inspired to write my first book primarily because I think that I have created and developed an idea and story that I need to tell. I love alternative history, scandals and stories that show people and the established norms in a new light. Humour and art can cut through class, inhibitions and status quo. To me, satire, parodies and sarcasm are invaluable means to change people’s minds. One thing that I am curious about is how we view the royal family. I find it fascinating that they exist and persist solely due to the public’s imagination and belief. For example, although hardly any of us ever met the Queen, we all have an image of her in our imagination. What really is the difference of this to our enrapture and admiration of Gandalf or Princess Leia? This shared understanding of a character - and that is all that the Queen really was to the 99.9% of us who never met her, is a fiction. But one that did not happen by accident. The image of a dutiful and extraordinary family that, by their bloodline and destiny are superior to us, is so fabricated and fragile that it needs ridicule. Princes and princesses belong in fairytales, but our culture, history and media give us them in real life.

 

And so, this blurring of fact and fiction, truth and tripe, has made me write my own version of what happened to the royal family in the 1990s. Some of us believe in gods, some in fairies and some in magic. In a way, it’s all interchangeable, but certainly not unimportant. As Professor Dumbledore said to Harry just after he had been killed, ‘Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real.’ To believe something, is to make it real. I believe that it this suspension of disbelief that grants the royal family, effectively, a form of magic. Even if some, or even more than half of us, do not believe in this magic, it can still continue if the story is told often enough. Britain’s own ‘big lie’ can seem harmless – and this is certainly how our ‘constitutional monarchy’ likes to be seen – but the magic of their majesty grants them more power than the Death Star or Iron Throne ever could.

 

This is what my book is about. Who, if anyone, is worthy of this power? What does it do to those who hold it? And what would it take for the illusion to end? Today, we do not have kings leading armies into battle, we have a witless old fool who is outsmarted by a fountain pen. We do not have a whimsical romance of true love and splendour, we have a dour concubine who ensures that all the affections of her husband are directed at her, with none to spare for his children. How did we get here where the difference between reality and fiction is so stretched that the magic is beginning to crack. If the warped fairytale that we are living in is so obviously fabricated, then could my version be closer to the truth? In my story the fantastical becomes the mundane, the unspoken becomes the undeniable and maybe, if enough people read the book and see these ‘characters’ in a different light, the fiction becomes reality.