The Assassination of
Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel, abridged by
Julian Wilkinson. Prod. Simon Richardson, Elizabeth Allard. Perf. Rebekah Staton, Harriet Walter. BBC Radio 4, 5-9 January
2015.
BBCiPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wv09d
to 9 February 2015
This Book at
Bedtime reading of four short stories offered an interesting variety of
situations and characters. Read by
Harriet Walter, “Sorry to Disturb” was a semi-autobiographical tale of an
English woman living in Jeddah with her husband, and encountering a Saudi
Arabian man who seemed unable to leave her alone. Through a series of encounters,
whether
planned or otherwise, the story looked in a humorous way at the clash of
cultures between “west” and “east”; between the oh-so-polite narrator and her
Saudi acquaintance, who seemed oblivious to her scruples. On the face of it,
the narrator occupied the
moral high ground, as she vowed to remain true to her husband and resist some
of the man’s more outlandish schemes; but Mantel, as a story-teller, prompted
us to reflect on whether we ought to take the narrator’s claims at face value.
“Comma” focused on the experiences of a young girl,
Kitty, ostensibly led astray by Mary, the daughter of an ostracized local
family. They both become obsessed by
what they have seen in the garden of a bourgeois house close by; and determine
to find out what the mystery is all about.
Yet the story is not so much preoccupied with what they discover, but
how the discovery affects both of them.
Suffice to say that the main focus of attention centers on the
difference between a comma and a full stop, both in terms of grammar and in
terms of one’s life-experience.
Inevitably there has been something of a furor over
the short story that lends its name to the entire collection, with protests
raised at Mantel’s apparent “disrespect” for a great Prime Minister.
Listening to Harriet Walter’s reading of the
tale, one wonders why anyone would really be bothered about it; its main focus
of attention centers on a narrator who thinks she has admitted a tradesperson
into her house, someone intent on fixing her boiler. It is only when the person
assembles a
sophisticated weapon and points it at the hospital exit where Mrs. Thatcher is
due to appear that the narrator understands the true purpose of the visit. Mantel’s
story offers some penetrating
thoughts on why many people during the Eighties hated Mrs. Thatcher, as well as
inviting us to reflect on how we might feel if we felt an assassination was
about to take place.
Alternately humorous yet sympathetic to the various
narrators’ dilemmas, Mantel proves herself once again to be a fine writer. I
wish the book every success; she certainly
deserves it.