Hilary Mantel lops off heads with an almost jihadi-like zest – but, of course, mostly ancient aristocratic ones. Now that The Assassination of Mrs Thatcher is to be a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime in January, the author of Wolf Hall has once again had to defend her latest work of fiction (fiction, one stresses). Too topical, apparently. The author should have waited 400 years, as with the beheading of Thomas Cromwell.
Historically, there’s no question that the IRA would have made the assassination of Mrs Thatcher entirely factual if they could have. Indeed, they nearly did, 13 months after the fictional attempt Mantel fantasises about. She imagines it happening at Windsor in early August 1983, after the prime minister has had an operation to repair a damaged retina (that operation did actually happen); a very real attempted murder of the entire Tory cabinet took place at the party’s conference in Brighton the following year. Thatcher escaped; others didn’t.
The main Brighton assassin, Patrick Magee, spent his years in Long Kesh prison getting a PhD in works of fiction dealing with the Troubles, and the crime fiction (including assassination) it inspired. It would be interesting to know what Dr Magee thinks of the Mantel story. He, unlike her, claims to have worked off the “boiling detestation” that she says inspired her story.
One can think of many precursor works. Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller Rogue Male (would you kill Hitler before he started the war?); Jeffrey Archer’s Shall We Tell the President? (like much of Archer’s fiction, better than you might think); Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin had it prominently on his bookshelf); Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (poor novel, great film); Homeland, even. What is Brody other than a vice-presidential assassin with whom, perversely, we are invited to sympathise?
Original it may not be, but Mantel does the assassination scenario well. Her story is a good choice for the BBC to send us to bed thinking about. It’s tense, plays some neat tricks on the unwary reader and is dialogue-rich. One does wonder, though, if Harriet Walter, who is doing the reading, can handle the voice of a lumbering, middle-aged scouser with a raspy smoker’s throat. We’ll find out, unless the BBC loses its nerve.
Since the story has already been published in the Guardian there’s no need for spoiler alerts. The outcome of the story is ambiguous – but perhaps we could imagine an additional final line, as Thatcher leaves hospital: “She would need no more operations on her retina. The head that contained it no longer existed.”
Of course, Mrs Thatcher was assassinated – like Julius Caesar, by her trusted colleagues. If Hilary wants a commission, how about a short story describing what went through Geoffrey Howe’s mind on the night of 12 November 1990, just before he plunged the dagger?
