Wow. Politically charged, provocative, an imagining of a fictional assassination of a real-life figure. So daring. Such a clear narrative voice. So much to admire here with the use of setting as well as an opening address to the reader which draws us immediately in, with the drip drip of foreshadowing, even though the title does the job. “Picture first the street where she breathed her last.” Yet, we all know this never happened, but what if it had?
We’re in middle-class Windsor, amongst normal people, going about their lives – such banal detail around the age of the housing, the cars, parking problems, music that floats from open windows – Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach. The specificity is to be admired but it’s all part of the literary plan to plant hints that come thick and fast around what might happen. Mantel’s phrases and vocabulary are fantastic – “royalist lickspittles”, closet republicans, dissidents (in Windsor!) and an assassin who poses as a plumber, then as a photographer until he unpacks his bags.
It’s bold, punchy, unequivocal, funny, unsettling. It also caused an uproar, probably amongst Tories.
First published in The Guardian, September 2014, and available to read online here. Collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014
A Personal Anthology 