I love an unlikely dame, and I love Hilary Mantel for the power of her mind and the power of her mischief. Having been inducted into the establishment via the honours system and twice winning the Booker prize, Mantel continues to disrupt it all delightfully. She feels a bit sorry for “plastic” Kate Middleton. She writes a short story about assassinating Margaret Thatcher. She remembers England’s last civil war that many will never forgive Thatcher for.
This middle-aged author riles the powers that be more than many a would-be revolutionary.
When criticised by “tetchy” Tories who call her book “sick”, Mantel responds, all-seeing eyes ablaze, that she does not need to justify herself. The Telegraph cancels its serialisation, Conor Burns talks of her “disordered mind”. Mantel has either committed a thought crime, or the Conservative imagination has shrunk ever smaller.
Under what legislation would Mantel be arrested I wonder?
She is ever more magnificent, utterly compelling, genuinely anarchic; showing us what she observes, what she knows and what only she is capable of imagining. Sometimes it is exactly what we don’t want to see. Isn’t that what the best writers do? And isn’t she our best? Long may she disturb us.
