HILARY MANTEL The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
These stories infuse the everyday with the strange, the uncanny and an ever-present sense of threat.
In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house.
The first sentence from ‘Sorry to Disturb’, which opens Hilary Mantel’s collection of short stories, immediately indicates the contemporary setting – differentiating itself from the historical novels for which Mantel is best known – at the same time that it introduces the sense of menace that haunts the entire collection. In fact, ‘sorry to disturb’ is an apology voiced by a character who does, indeed, disturb the narrator, in the same way that the collection disturbs the reader.
This particular story takes place in the expat community in Saudi Arabia. Subsequent stories are set in locations such as a night-time road on a hilly Greek island, a suburban kitchen, a Windsor bedroom, and a medical clinic. Just as Mantel’s words are often deceptively bland – as in that opening sentence – the settings frequently have a kind of banal middle-class familiarity: carpeted, furnished with plump chairs, equipped with handfuls of wine glasses. Even on the dark Greek hillside, the protagonists, a married couple, have dragged their tense domestic dysfunction with them on their holiday.
In story after story, the situations initially present themselves as small and unremarkable. Poor children spy on a rich neighbour in ‘Comma’. A married man kisses his neighbour’s wife at a party in ‘The Long QT’. Working relationships prove difficult in ‘Harley Street’. A woman waits for the plumber who is going to fix her boiler in ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’.
It’s everyday stuff. That is, until that ever-present sense of threat blooms into sudden death, violence, sinister strangeness; until that uneasiness veers to outright gothic queasiness. In ‘Comma’, one of the children throws a stone that hits the rich neighbours’ deformed baby. A woman sees her dead father on a London train, and follows him (‘Terminus’). Work tensions between the utterly ‘normal’ women working at the Harley Street clinic build into overlapping layers of transgression. The petty dysfunctions of those British vacationers in Greece collide with real horror. And in the final story, the ‘plumber’ who has been allowed into the suburban home turns out to be an assassin, who now has access to the vantage point perfect for carrying out his mission.
Another persistent unifying strand is a self-aware, self-deprecating humour that suggests the characters’ desperate attempts to keep horror at bay. So in ‘Sorry to Disturb’, the narrator – isolated in a cockroach-ridden apartment while her uncommunicative husband is at work, marooned within a restrictive culture with barely understood social rules, ill, thrown off-kilter by her drug regime – summons a wry comment about how they live:
We were big on bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortises, safety-chains and windows that were high and barred.
‘The air conditioning rattled away,’ she says at another point, ‘like an old relative with a loose cough.’
Together the stories create a sharp portrait of contemporary Brits, especially their bitter class-awareness. Look at the way ‘Comma’ delineates social hierarchies: the rich Hathaways live in their big country house, but poorer parents in the community distinguish minute differences in status, forbidding their daughter from playing with Mary Joplin, a child whose mother is deemed beyond the boundaries of social acceptability. The children, meanwhile, think of poverty in the images from storybooks: ‘coloured patches sewn on your clothes’. So Mary Joplin – ’with her scrawny arms, her kneecaps like saucers of bone, her bruised legs, her snigger and her cackle and her snort’ – asks her playmate:
‘Are you rich?’
I was startled. ‘I don’t think so. We’re about middle. Are you rich?’
She pondered. She smiled at me as if we were comrades now. ‘We’re about middle too.’
‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ also spotlights class. The woman whose home has been invaded lashes out at the working-class assassin: ‘You’re not too proud to shoot out of my bourgeois sash window, are you?’ Like the others, this story presents a complex picture of a society containing the ‘intelligentsia’, republicans, socialists, the unemployed, Liverpudlians committed to a cause, ‘Irish’ whose only connection to that identity is the Irish songs they sing on a Saturday night.
Mantel’s two Man Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012) are long historical works about Thomas Cromwell, minister to the court of Henry VIII. Like the stories in this collection, the novels combine politics with domestic rhythms and textures. And they too are portraits of Britain, depicting the forms taken by human hunger for power and intimacy. The long works are on a grand scale and build astonishing narrative drive. By contrast, these short stories are much more delicate, elusive, and suggestive.
Comparing the relationships of these various works to history reveals different types of engagement with the past. Rather than telling a story in the blank spaces between history’s facts – as do the Cromwell books – these stories sometimes play with history; after all, Margaret Thatcher was not really assassinated in August 1983. Some, though, make use of Mantel’s personal story. For example, ‘Sorry to Disturb’ clearly draws on her own experience of living in Saudi Arabia with her husband. (Her 1988 novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street also fictionalises that time.)
Probably each reader will gravitate towards different stories in the collection, and will feel others are less strong. For me, ‘How Shall I Know You?’, about a writer on tour, was a mean-spirited sneer at readers and book tours; I couldn’t help feeling personally targeted by Mantel’s disdain. And occasionally I wished there were a little more variation in tone. That ever-present voice devalued ‘The Heart Fails without Warning’, a story about teenage anorexia; it seemed in that context to be mere performance, lacking sincerity.
But these are quibbles. Mantel’s conjuring of tensions between people, her brilliant, effortless facility with language in this compact form of writing, and above all her ability to infuse the everyday with the strange and uncanny, make this collection well worth reading.
Hilary Mantel The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories Fourth Estate 2014 HB 256pp $29.99
Jeannette Delamoir is an ex-Queenslander and former academic. She loves writing, reading and living in Sydney.
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