The storm over Hilary Mantel’s The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – the final short story in a collection both subtle and gripping – tells us rather more about the temper of our divided nation in a moment of constitutional panic than about the workings of fiction.
Would Lord Timothy Bell have called for a “police investigation” of Tolstoy after the appearance of War and Peace, I wonder, as he did in the Sunday Times for the two-time Man Booker prizewinner Mantel? After all, Tolstoy’s hero Pierre, armed and dangerous, spends a good part of the novel poised to rid the world of Napoleon.
Nor do I remember the American author Nicholson Baker being called “sick and deranged”, or urged to see a therapist after the appearance of his 2004 fiction about the assassination of George W Bush. It is good that English PEN has taken up Mantel’s cause and pointed out that recklessly calling up the spectre of the police is a threat to our long-standing commitment to free and open expression.
Assassinations and assassination attempts – parallel universes in which “real” politicians, loved or loathed, lived on or didn’t – figure in fictions from Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes to Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. Perhaps the excited response in Mantel’s case, and its punitive tone, has something to do with the fact that she is the most recent laureate of English history novelists. In that sense, through no fault of her own, she is part of the heritage industry. Its fans are often enough fans of Thatcher too. The Telegraph, which initially planned to run The Assassination and then determined not to since its readers would not be pleased, does assuredly know what its readers like. (So does the Guardian, one might add, which not only first ran the story, but an interview with Mantel on its news pages.)
But what Mantel, ever mischievous and a lover of the transgressive (why else choose Thomas Cromwell as her hero?), calls the “foaming at the mouth” is undoubtedly also due to the fact that she and Thatcher are both women. Despite 200 years of battling for women’s rights, and 50 years after the impish and killing malice of Ruth Rendell, we still prefer to think of women writers as virtuous, indeed high-minded innocents whose wishful fantasies are ever to do with men and romance, or at least with men – even where assassination is concerned.
What Mantel does so brilliantly in her story is to make her heroine, who is as drawn to ridding the world of Thatcher as the assassin who takes up his post in her room, a rather dull and respectable middle-class inhabitant of Windsor: a woman who offers tea to her visitor who she first thinks is the plumber. She’s a woman who simply can’t bear Thatcher’s style, her voice, her walk – her contempt.
All of us, even the most ordinary, harbour love-hate fantasies about our most potent leaders. Thatcher, a woman with a punishing, commanding and, by all male reports, very feminine presence, more than most. I don’t really think, as Mantel has said in an interview, that Thatcher was more of a “psychological transvestite” than most. We all have aspects of both sexes, and femininity has long been something of a masquerade, a part to be played according to the time’s demands. Thatcher did it in retro fashion, as if she had learned her cues from the Hollywood megastars of the 50s, in which she grew up. The fact that she didn’t support other women hardly made Thatcher unique. Feminism is surely in part about making us aware of the forms of sexism being meted out by both genders.
It was Thatcher’s politics, put across in the rehearsed tones of the know-it-all, better-than-thou nanny, that made so many of us break out in visceral rage. After decades of one-nation Toryism, she was a divisive force of a very strong order. What the Scottish referendum revealed was that it was Thatcherism that lay at the basis of the yes-voter hatred of England and the English. The forces now rallying for swift constitutional change – which could expunge the best aspects of the welfare state from a Nigel Farage, Tory backbench vision of little England – are the very ones who would see in Mantel’s story an “assault” on our values.
Even when they are working with history, novelists probe our fantasies. To interpret Hilary Mantel’s story, in the gist of the Mail’s Stephen Glover, as a message with a deadly intent would surely be to invoke the thought police. But the thought-police are the very people we need to keep at bay if we are to have an intelligent and reasoned debate about the future of “one nation” with many, different and differing parts.
