Reviews

The Diana Chronicles

Stephen Osborne

The death and life of Diana, Princess of Wales, provides Tina Brown, the well-known Diana tribute artist and lookalike—her Di-likeness fills the back cover of The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday), which makes it uncomfortable to read this book on public transit unless you keep it flat on your lap—with an opportunity to insert the names of wealthy people she knows or perhaps would like to know into any of hundreds, possibly thousands of tangled sentences. “Then, on January 15, 1992, some cheesy two-year-old holiday snaps of Fergie vacationing in Morocco with the Houston socialite Lynn Wyatt’s thirty-eight-year-old playboy son Steve were stolen by a snooping window cleaner from the top of a dusty wardrobe in Wyatt’s apartment in London’s Cadogan Square” (p. 297). Readers who like their metaphors tangled as well will find many savoury examples: “If the Yorks were hurtling toward divorce, Princess Anne had already got there. Behind her horsey gravitas, the Princess Royal has always been catnip to equerries” (p. 298). The phenomenon that was Princess Di in the imagination of the world is accounted for by Tina Brown purely in the shallow terms of media-speak. Carl Jung is dismissed on page 221 (a desolate Prince Charles “retreats” into Jung’s writings)—but surely the archetypal forces expressed in the life and death of Diana are worthy of Jungian attention. However ridiculous it all was on the surface, the Diana myth was big and it was deep. It is neither of those things in The Diana Chronicles.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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