This short story collection offers fans of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies something to tide them over as they eagerly await the third and final volume in Hilary Mantel’s twice Man Booker-winning Tudor trilogy, while also offering us what’s perhaps a timely reminder of the breadth of her literary prowess.
The opening piece, Sorry to Disturb, was originally published as a memoir, detailing Mantel’s curtailed and claustrophobic life in Saudi Arabia in the early 80s and the uneasy friendship she formed with a Pakistani businessman. Most haunting though is Mantel’s account of her ill health and the subsequent “fierce drug regime” she was on. The disorientation of the lifestyle imposed upon her and that resulting from the side effects of her medication combines with eerie effect: “I wonder if Jeddah left me forever off-kilter in some way, tilted from the vertical and condemned to see life skewed.”
We return to the same year in the final story, and the one from which the collection takes it name, though this is decidedly a work of fiction. Mantel imagines an IRA sniper invading the home of an unsuspecting Windsor resident – who mistakes him first for a plumber, then a paparazzi – so he can take out the PM as she leaves an adjacent private hospital after routine eye surgery. The interloper’s real intentions dawn on the narrator with a slow crescendo of awareness as out of his bag he unpacks “metal parts which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit.”
Death rears its ugly head in many of the stories – from the inevitable wasting away of a teenage anorexic, a woman suddenly struck down by a fatal heart defect in a moment of shock, a child killed in the dark by a reckless driver, and a woman who sees the ghost of her dead father at Waterloo. Mantel’s writing is dark even when it’s comic – the kitchen smell of a provincial hotel described as “deceptively sweet, as if there were a corpse in the wardrobe”; or a woman named Lorraine who laments: “It’s so sad to be called after a quiche.”
The addition of a new story for this paperback edition, The School of English, a tale of rape inside a smart London townhouse, sees the fearless Mantel turn the final screw in a collection already deliciously macabre.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is published by Fourth Estate (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £6.99
