Hilary Mantel - The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Hilary Mantel has adapted well to life as a national treasure. Not content with the controversy stirred up over her perfectly reasonable comments about Kate Middleton, the title of her most recent book is seemingly designed to cause apoplexy in the right wing press (and so it did, with one MP calling for a police investigation). Beyond the headlines, though, how does her second collection of short stories stand up?

Although this is not a bespoke collection (all but one of the stories had been published previously, mainly in The Guardian and the LRB), there is still a pleasing continuity of theme. Primarily, Mantel is writing about the cruelty often found lurking beneath the surface of privileged lives, and there is no surprise who the chief villain is: the first reference to ‘the grocer’s daughter’ comes in the opening story, Sorry to Disturb, while there are also numerous mentions of ‘cloven hooves’. Surely no coincidence.  

The whole landscape of this collection is oppressive, for those at both ends of the social spectrum. Wealthy characters often find themselves constrained by social mores, such as the female narrator of Sorry to Disturb, who is holed up in an apartment in Saudi Arabia. While her husband goes out to work, she is hemmed in with ‘bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortices, safety-chains and windows that were high and barred'. She soon discovers that female life is heavily policed, and that as a woman she is afforded 'no motive power' in this culture. This is not just something that happens abroad: in both The Long QT and Offences Against the Person, women are expected to accept their husbands’ infidelities in return for economic security. At the other end of the scale, Mantel depicts a high street which has suffered at the hands of ‘free enterprise’, dominated by 'freelance debt-collectors, massage parlours, body-shops and money-launderers, dealers in seedy accommodation'.

In some stories, the sense of oppression verges on pure horror. Harley Street offers us a look at the clientele of an upmarket medical practice from the point of view of the almost invisible assistants, giving the story an Upstairs Downstairs feel. The social commentary evolves into something more supernatural, as Mantel plays on the life-sapping effect of working with a grumpy colleague. Winter-Proof is a brief story of a holiday gone wrong, exploring affairs, selfishness and the holidaymakers’ casual exploitation of workers from poorer countries in the course of the taxi ride from airport to hotel, whilst still finding room for a horror story twist at the end.

The writing is also pleasingly waspish at times. In How Shall I Know You, Mantel satirises the cynicism of a weary novelist on the promotional trail. 'One summer at the fag-end of the nineties,’ her protagonist is summoned ‘to go out of London to talk to a literary society'. Asked by the event’s organiser whether she still resembles her book cover photographs, she replies that ‘they are not a bad likeness, only I am older now, of course, thinner in the face, my hair is much shorter and a different colour, and I seldom smile in quite that way’. Asked about her influences, she replies with her ‘usual list of obscure, indeed non-existent Russians’. In the title story, Mantel makes much of the incongruity of a gunman using a middle class residence as his sniper’s nest, as the owner bickers with the would-be assassin: 'you're not too proud to shoot out of my bourgeois sash window, are you?’

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6^th 1983 has been portrayed as a form of wish-fulfilment, but much of Mantel’s ire is reserved for the state of the ‘intelligentsia’, so ineffectual in resisting her: 'they had to show the strength of their feeling by tactical voting, and their strength of their spirit by attending outré events at the arts centre'. The hard left, represented by the gunman, and the liberal middle class figure of the householder, are portrayed as occupying different worlds, with very little common language.

The collection showcases Mantel’s versatility, and her ability to conjure memorable phrases and imagery. There is a Ballardian tinge to her description of a flyover as an amphitheatre ‘in which the traffic's casualties enacted, flickering, their final moments'. In Offences Against The Person, she injects a sense of Victorian gothic into a policeman’s formal court language as she describes a barroom brawl in Ancoats: 'the landlord wilfully misdirected him into the backyard, followed him out and booted him around... finally opening a gate and precipitating him into a drear and filthy ginnel'.

The title story is an obvious highlight, the dialogue between middle class householder and the assassin who has gained entrance to her home having the makings of a fine one act drama, with its Pinteresque power dynamics, but the quality is remarkably consistent throughout the collection. Away from the headlines, I was particularly impressed by Offences Against The Person and Harley Street, whilst every story had something to recommend it.