Tag: Hilary Mantel

‘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