‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel

I might have saved my favourite until last. In this story, Hilary Mantel takes a violent revenge fantasy – a counterfactual assassination of Margaret Thatcher by an IRA gunman after a stay at a Windsor eye clinic – and, without neutralising the fantasy’s political motivation, transforms it into a profound reflection on the nature of history.

The narrator is expecting a local workman, Duggan, who is to fix her faulty boiler. But the man who turns up at her door and lets himself in is not Duggan. She assumes the intruder must be one of the hundreds of press photographers who have descended on her neighbourhood since the prime minister arrived:

‘How much will you get for a good shot?’
‘Life without parole,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘It’s not a crime.’
‘That’s my feeling.’

But as he opens his “boiler man’s bag” and removes the “metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit,” the narrator begins to understand that her flat has been chosen for its perfect vantage point over the eye clinic’s rear entrance, from which Thatcher is expected to depart.

The story transforms into something unexpectedly profound when the narrator leads the gunman into a dark corridor to show him a secret exit by which he might be able to escape, and the secret exit becomes a metaphor for the contingent nature of history: “note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there. And note the cold wind that blows through it, when you open it a crack. History could always have been otherwise.”

Then the characters return to the bedroom with its view over the clinic ready for Thatcher’s departure, and the story concludes with the event its title promises, an event that never happened but could have, with:

One easy wink of the world’s blind eye: ‘Rejoice,’ he says. ‘Fucking rejoice.’

First published in The Guardian in September, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014)

‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6th 1983’ by Hilary Mantel

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

‘Sorry to Disturb’ by Hilary Mantel

I was reading Wolf Hall when a friend gifted me this collection. This story is the opener and is set in Jeddah in 1983, based closely on Mantel’s own four years in Saudi Arabia. What Mantel manages here is to communicate the claustrophobic life of the white expat in the region. The narrator carries her own biases and is nearly out of her mind with anxiety, the thrum of which runs under this uncomfortable account of an odd friendship between the English narrator and a Pakistani man she reluctantly allows into her home.

“Sometimes in those days when I closed my eyes I felt that I was looking back into my own skull. I could see the hemispheres of my brain. They were convoluted and the colour of putty.”

First published in memoir form – as ‘Someone to Disturb’ in The London Review of Books, 2009, and available to read here. Published as a short story in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Winter Break’ by Hilary Mantel

The sheer literal weight of the Wolf Hall trilogy can sometimes obscure the fact that Hilary Mantel was equally at home writing punchy, short fiction such as this story. What a loss her recent death was.

‘Winter Break’ is a brisk story of a childless couple visiting an unnamed country – probably Greece, given the name of the hotel they eventually arrive at. On the way there in a taxi, they bicker and moan about each other in the way that long-term couples do, and I just want to pick out one fantastic phrase here that says so much about their relationship:

She could feel Phil’s opinions banking up behind his teeth: now that won’t do the gearbox any good, will it?

Then something very bad happens and being in a foreign country, they either don’t understand what has happened, or they do and choose to ignore it. Either way, they leave everything to their driver to deal with and as a result they are now complicit, with the final image revealing the true horror of what they have been involved in.

First published in the Guardian Review in 2010 and available to read here. Collected in Best British Short Stories 2011, Salt, 2012 and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate 2014