Swan Song (Diana, My Sister), by Charles Spencer | Free Audiobook
The brother's version, in his own voice
Most of what the world knows about Diana was written by people who never met her. Her brother is not one of them, and that is the whole reason this book exists: the two youngest Spencers grew up together on the same estate, shared the same boarding-school misery and the same collapsing marriage in their parents' house, and invented private names for each other when they were children. He is the one person who can describe her before there was a story attached to her.
The book is built around two threads. One is the childhood, told from inside a family that was already coming apart well before any prince appeared on the scene. The other is the week in 1997 that he had to get through in public: the funeral, the arrangements, the abbey, the walk behind the coffin that the world watched on television, and the years of hindsight that followed. In between sits the thing that changed the family permanently, which was not simply that Diana married into the royal family but that she became, almost immediately, the most photographed person on earth.
It is a memoir rather than a history, and it is read by the author himself over 9 hrs and 47 mins, which is worth knowing: a brother describing the worst week of his life in his own voice is a different experience from reading it on a page. It is also a contested book, and the review below explains how and why.
The strangest thing about this book's reception is that it is both loved and detested, and the two camps barely overlap. On Amazon the audio sits at 4.3 from more than two hundred ratings, which is a public saying yes. In the British press, it was received with a hostility that reviewers rarely bother to hide, and the language is worth quoting precisely because it is so extreme.
The Guardian's review was published under the headline a furious exercise in score-settling by Diana's brother, and it does not soften from there: after four hundred pages, the reader is left with a certain sourness at the manner in which it is told, and the reviewer counts himself among those who enjoy petty grievances only to conclude that the earl has so many axes grinding away in this book that at times it's impossible to hear what he's saying. The same piece takes aim at the prose itself, and this is the objection I find hardest to argue with: discussing an exchange in which the king is said to have hissed at Diana, the reviewer notes that hissed is one of those verbs, like snarled, writers reach for to make the person being described look worse.
The Times framed it more generously and more uncomfortably at once, writing that it is entirely possible to find the book both a violation of Diana's memory and a fascinating example of historical myth-making. That is the fairest single sentence I have read about it, and it captures why readers and reviewers have parted company so completely. What the reviewers do concede is real: the Guardian found genuinely touching passages about Diana, a portrait of their mother Frances that reads as a useful corrective to a publicly maligned figure, and concluded of the funeral material that Spencer tells it well. What they object to is where the author puts himself in relation to her.
There is also a version of this dispute that is not about literature at all. The book contains an account of a remark attributed to King Charles, and Buckingham Palace issued an unusually robust denial, which the BBC covered in a piece asking what readers should make of the competing claims. That is worth knowing before you decide what you are buying: this is not a quiet family memoir with a few revelations in it, it is a book that is being argued about in public, with the other side answering on the record.
Where that leaves a listener depends on why you are here. If you want the most intimate account of Diana's childhood that exists, written by the only sibling who shared it, the passages are there and the narration, by Charles Spencer himself, turns them into something closer to testimony than to reading. If you want an account of her marriage and death that does not have a grievance attached to it, the British reviewers are telling you clearly that this is not the place to find it. If you like a famous life told in the subject's own voice, the site also has Dolly Parton, Songteller, which is the same idea done with far less controversy attached to it.
Swan Song is Charles Spencer's account of his sister Diana, the closest thing to an insider's portrait that exists of her childhood, and the story of the week in 1997 when he stood in Westminster Abbey in front of the whole world. It is read by the author himself, which is the reason to choose this edition over the page.
The book covers their shared childhood as the two youngest Spencers, the distance that opened up when Diana married into the royal family and became the most photographed woman alive, and the arrangements and funeral that followed her death.
It runs 9 hrs and 47 mins, published by Penguin. The critical reception has been sharp and the public reception warm, which is worth knowing before you start. With the free trial, you can pick any title you want, this one included, cancel whenever you like, and the audiobook stays in your library after the trial ends.
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