Plotting Thatcher’s assassination …
LONDON — It was on Aug. 6, 1983 — decades before her twin Booker triumph with the novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies — that a young Hilary Mantel looked out the window of her apartment and began plotting the murder of Britain’s prime minister.
That was the day Margaret Thatcher was due to leave a private hospital in Windsor after undergoing eye surgery. And it became the day when the seed was planted in Mantel’s mind for the unsettling tale that was to emerge 31 years later under the title The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher.
It’s also the title work in the collection of 10 short stories being published in Canada by Harper-Collins as an interim treat for fans awaiting the final volume in her monumental award-winning trilogy about that Machiavellian Tudor mastermind Thomas Cromwell.
The 62-year-old novelist knows the Thatcher story is provocative.
“It is, indeed, but what else are writers for?” she says with quiet amusement. “They’re not there to reinforce the status quo. They’re not there to make people feel comfortable. They’re there to provoke and question and shake people out of their certainties and habits of mind.”
Mantel never hesitates to speak her mind. But because she now enjoys a huge profile after winning two Man Bookers and other prizes, she has also become tabloid fodder when she says or does something controversial.
After she made a provocative speech suggesting Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, had been turned by the culture of the day into a “machine-made” princess “designed by a committee” and a woman whose “only point and purpose” was to give birth, even Prime Minister David Cameron took her to task. A media frenzy ensued, and she and her husband had print and television crews camping outside their South Devon home. Mantel dealt with that invasion of privacy in a forthright manner.
“We just drew down the blinds,” she says matter-of-factly. And she’s prepared to do the same thing with any controversy over The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
And controversial it has proven to be, with news this week that London’s Daily Telegraph has backed out of a high-priced deal to publish the story, along with an interview with the author. The Telegraph reportedly paid tens of thousands of dollars for ex- clusive first-publication rights to the story. But a report in the rival Guardian says the Telegraph’s weekend editor “went ballistic” last week when he finally read the story and immediately cancelled it on the grounds that it would upset the paper’s loyal conservative readership.
The author says the idea for the Assassination story took years to come to fruition and was helped along by a morphine-induced epiphany when Mantel, whose life has been plagued by illness, was hospitalized in 2010.
But for Mantel, who was living in Windsor 31 years ago, it was a story grounded in the reality of her own experience. “I stood there on the sixth of August, 1983, looking through the window of my flat. I was exactly where the narrator of my story is standing and I saw Mrs. Thatcher emerge from the adjacent building.
“I wasn’t a published writer in those days, but I was very much a writer. Another person jumps inside your body, and you’re measuring your distance from her with another eye — and in my case it was with the eye of an assassin. So the story began there …”
But it had a long gestation period. “I couldn’t find the form. I knew it had something to do with a fire door …. So the years and decades went by … and then in 2010 when I was in hospital for major surgery and had been given morphine, I had a night of very active waking dreams.”
It was then that her assassin came into focus.
“I saw him in all his particular nature — his unravelling sweater, his sticking-up hair. He was a man you would pass in a crowd but had a very particular human reality — yet it was still another three years before the story was set.”