Cruel worlds
Hilary Mantel’s works — brilliant, elusive, inventive, psychologically acute and gorgeously written — vary more exuberantly in style and subject matter than almost any other great author. Nonetheless, they consistently track certain obsessions in theme and subject matter: cruelty, the uses and misuses of power, the shocks of illness and mortality, and the invasions of the spirit world. As much as Mantel is celebrated for exploring the workings of long-vanished monarchies, she’s vilified for her temerity in considering contemporary power issues, whether she’s writing an opinion piece that mentions the symbolic role played by a photogenic princess or a short story about the imagined assassination of a former prime minister. None of this seems to slow her down.
Among her projects, she’s best known for the deeply serious trilogy in progress about Thomas Cromwell. The first two Booker Prize-winning novels — “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” — combine a fierce political and psychological perspective with an intimate portrait of a man both caught in and altering history.
In another of her modes, she produces elliptical and hauntingly bitter autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works, including her memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” and her first collection of stories, “Learning to Talk.” At other times, she shows a sly, playful distance and fluidity, along with a graveyard humor, in novels like “Fludd” or “The Giant, O’Brien,” or in the extraordinarily funny, acid and dark “Beyond Black,” in which a medium, pursued and “guided” by demonic spirits, displays a shrewd showmanship, giving “the punters, the trade” what they want.
“The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher” combines the dream logic and emotional truth of “Learning to Talk” and “Giving Up the Ghost” with the darkness and flair for spectacle of “Beyond Black.” It’s a perfect book for October, a collection of literary horror stories, disturbing, funny, moving and eerie, with dramatic changes in situation and scenery from story to story, as if the reader had caught a train ride through a haunted tunnel, peeking into weird tableaux full of ghosts, macabre figures and even the occasional vampire.
Most of the stories end with a twist or discovery, a sudden turn that illuminates the story and characters, more like drawing back the curtain to show another reality than like a stage trick. Like the punters in “Beyond Black,” we do and don’t believe these wonders. These stories may not appeal to as wide an audience as her Cromwell trilogy, but those who love her darker and more playful works are likely to be both bewitched and delighted.
This new book is less explicitly semi-autobiographical and more stylistically daring than her earlier collection of stories. Many of these stories are told by characters musing about the ruptures in their own past — unsettling turns, betrayals and losses — ranging from the dislocations of the expat life or of grave illness to discoveries of adultery (leading to memorable incidents with broken glass and then to broken families) to unexpected acts of kindness that diminish or shame the recipient. And, as so often in Mantel, the dead have unreasonable demands, except when, saddest of all, they want nothing to do with the living.
The stories’ subtexts can be quite serious. “Harley Street” depicts a grotesque and slapdash clinic in ways that convey something about what it means to suffer monstrously at the hands of doctors. Loyalties in this book never lie where one expects: The painful cruelty of a child angry about her sister’s anorexia in “The Heart Fails Without Warning” turns into an increasingly dangerous allegiance. The narrator’s welcoming of an unexpected terrorist visitor in the title story, a provocative alternativehistory tale, feels surprising and believable. And in “Terminus,” a man spots the ghost of his dead father and has a vision of the presence of all the other dead among the living: “how many of all these surging thousands are solid, and how many of these assumptions are tricks of the light? How many, I ask you, are connected at all points, how many are utterly and convincingly in the state they purport to be: which is, alive?”
Mantel’s great gift, beyond her acrobatic and sly sentences, her mysterious and layered narrative structures, her understanding of all the possible abuses of power — personal or political — is to make her readers feel as if our hearts have been dipped in acid, and to make us (the punters) grateful for the troubling and delicious view into all these different lives, deaths and lives after death.