THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER
Hilary Mantel
A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company
242 pages; $27
Neither Wolf Hall nor Bring Up the Bodies is the Hilary Mantel book most relevant to The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, her new volume of short stories. Instead, the germane book is her 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. That book describes a woman who is passive, illness-plagued and spooked. The narrators of these stories are much more like Ms Mantel's description of herself than like the ironclad Machiavellians who dominate her Thomas Cromwell trilogy-in-progress.
Set in recent times, this new book's stories have narrators much more outwardly meek and inwardly turbulent than the murderous royals and puppeteers so beloved in her historical fiction.
The book's opener is "Sorry to Disturb", though it was first published as "Someone to Disturb" and billed as a memoir in the London Review of Books in 2009; that small title change heightens the faux meekness. In any case, the piece uses the autobiographical fact that Ms Mantel once lived in Saudi Arabia as the wife of a geologist, at a time when being the wife of any foreigner was an unhappy plight.
The narrator is heavily medicated, as Ms Mantel had been, because of some undescribed illness. (Ms Mantel's turned out to be severe endometriosis, which led to major surgery and an irrevocable change in her appearance; she went from sylph-thin to heavy as a result of drugs that also made her generally miserable.) And the character is terribly lonely. But as the story begins, a not-bad-looking Pakistani stranger knocks on her door, asking to use the phone. Whether out of desire or curiosity or some benighted idea of the obligations of Britain to its long-lost empire, she lets him in, and then lets him in again the next day. Though she doesn't realise it - we do - she is desperate for someone, anyone, to change her life.
The story, with a title now made more apologetic, speaks to a deep yearning in this woman and a dangerous flippancy in her visitor. He turns out to be married to an American woman whom he plans to ditch, and regards his new English conquest as a catch worth flaunting. It's not the plot that matters as much as the superb little touches with which Ms Mantel punctuates it. The woman's study of Arabic is a marvel in its own right: she divides her time between memorising phrases and vacuuming up the ubiquitous cockroaches in an apartment that has doors that remind her of a coffin. "Nineteenth Lesson: Are you married? Yes, my wife is with me, she's standing there in the corner of the room." And she conflates this with the squirmy thought of roaches in the vacuum cleaner bag.
Some of the stories here are short and very slight. "Comma", about the brief tormenting of an invalid by a mad, violent child, and "The Long QT", a pitch-black joke about one quick way to end a marriage, are barely vignettes. "Winter Break" is a brief bit of ghoulishness about a vacation from hell, and "The Heart Fails Without Warning" is about two sisters, teasingly close, though one is on the brink of starving to death. "Terminus" is an outright ghost story, with no real twist; "Harley Street" is evidence that Ms Mantel knows her way around vampires, especially those who pretend to be normal medical personnel.
And "How Shall I Know You?", one of only a few fully formed stories in this collection, might have been called "The Author's Revenge". It is discreetly savage payback for every dismal 15-seat author's appearance and night at a terrible hotel Ms Mantel must have put in during her lean years. Feeling vengeful, the author in the story confounds one audience by saying, "Why don't you call me Rose?" Of course, Rose is not her name.
Finally, the piece de resistance. "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher" allows Ms Mantel to transform a convenient coincidence in her own life into an opportunistic political fantasy. Ms Mantel lived in Windsor, England, when Thatcher had eye surgery at a hospital there, and Ms Mantel's window had an unobstructed view of the hospital entrance. Thus, a simple, murderous "What if?" from the author becomes a work of displaced animosity connecting an innocent woman minding her own business at home with a wish-fulfilling assassin for the Irish Republican Army. Arriving in the guise of a plumber sent to fix the woman's boiler, the assassin commandeers her apartment and makes her his prisoner.
Not that the woman minds this one bit. She hates Thatcher as much as the assassin does, and they engage in a spirited dialogue about whether Irish ancestry counts as serious political commitment or if that's just malarkey. ("I don't care about the songs your great-uncles used to sing on a Saturday night," he tells her.) The story is set in 1983, and Ms Mantel has said it took her a long time to get it to a full boil - which it has certainly reached, if the early reaction of Thatcherite British politicians is any indication.
Regardless, the woman in the apartment pulls no punches about her complete sympathy for the assassin and her own hatred for Thatcher. "She sleeps four hours a day," she says. "She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey." Perhaps she is having the eye operation because she is incapable of producing natural tears.
Because these stories lack the absolute toughness of the Cromwell books, and because they rely on a spiritual dimension that amounts to a narrative escape hatch, Ms Mantel includes a passage about why events that might have changed history, such as the assassination of Margaret Thatcher, exist in a netherworld where they either did or didn't happen. "History could always have been otherwise," she writes. Long story short: Ms Mantel can't kill off Margaret Thatcher. But it is not a matter of bloodthirstiness to wish Ms Mantel were as firm here as she is in her best books, which require no dodging for their historical narratives, and which so brilliantly amplify what is already known.
© The New York Times News Service 2014
