Dying of Strangeness

The failure of ritual in the Coronation of Charles III

Men must have heroes or they will die of strangeness

—Les Murray

Nick Cave explained accepting an invitation to the Coronation of Charles III on the grounds that, “I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter; what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the U.K. of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.”

From Stephen Pincus to Walter Bagehot to Tom Nairn, observers and commentators have understood the point of the British Monarchy was in its symbolic power, its ability to square political circles that could only be squared—like all circles—in theory, not in practice. That its role was, via pomp and circumstance, to project some idealised form of governance that somehow captured the quicksilver of national identity in a way that s…