As a work of literature Lord Stevens' report stinks. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images.
The fact that Lord Stevens' report into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed concludes precisely what a similar French report did a few years earlier (both blame the deaths of the People's Princess and her Arabian playboy lover on the lethal speed at which their Mercedes was travelling and the egregious amounts of alcohol consumed by their clinically depressive driver Henri Paul), it will do little to satisfy the millions of conspiracy theorists who yearn for more exotic explanations. Indeed, if Mohamed Al Fayed's press conference is anything to go by, the cost (nearly £4m), time it took to write (almost four years) and size of it (a nosebleed-inducing 900 pages) may actually help to fuel the happy speculation that the car crash was all the work of MI6, Phil the Greek and (lately) al-Qaida.
Though no one has as yet had the time to read the whole thing (will anyone, anywhere ever have the time?) one thing is certain: judged as a work of literature Lord Stevens' report stinks. Aside from a few spectacular descriptions of landscape and scene (you can practically smell that tunnel) what we have here is an unwieldy catalogue of badly indexed verbiage.
In this sense the books it most closely resembles are Thomas Pynchon's uberwank Against The Day, and the Warren Commission report into the assassination of President Kennedy. The latter, which weighs in at an eye-watering 26 volumes, was brilliantly described by the novelist Don Delillo as '"the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" and later as "a lost city of trivia".
Similar thoughts occur to you as you wade through Lord Stevens report. All the facts are there but they are presented in such an disorganised fashion that any attempt to piece together a coherent narrative or conspiracy feels like drowning. Compare this to the recent Iraq Survey Group report (a work of alarming brevity) or the 9/11 Commission report (a page turner worthy of Dan Brown) and you begin to see that there is a direct correlation between the readability (or otherwise) of this kind of document and the amount of nuts it succeeds in shutting up.
God forbid that anyone ever let Lord Stevens loose on an issue that actually matters.
