The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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He takes up the widowmaker, lays her tenderly across his knees. He tips his chair forward, and because I see his hands are once more slippery with sweat I bring him a towel and he takes it without speaking, and wipes his palms. Once more I am reminded of something priestly: a sacrifice. A wasp dawdles over the sill. The scent of the gardens is watery, green. The tepid sunshine wobbles in, polishes his shabby brogues, moves shyly across the surface of the dressing table. I want to ask: when what is to happen, happens, will it be noisy? From where I sit? If I sit? Or stand? Stand where? At his shoulder? Perhaps I should kneel and pray. Mantel, like Cromwell and Thatcher, is self-made – her mother was a mill worker and her father left when she was 11. But, Mantel believes, Thatcher hated the end result of her self-transformation: "She couldn't turn herself into a posh girl with the right vowels. If you're that dissatisfied with yourself you try to fix other people, and if they won't be fixed you become punitive. He nodded. ''And I want you to understand that. I'm not shooting her because she doesn't like the opera. Or because you don't care for – what in sod's name do you call it? – her accessories. It's not about her handbag. It's not about her hairdo. It's about Ireland. Only Ireland, right?'' With the introduction of a disabled girl, "diminutive and crooked", working at the B&B, the story begins to show signs of more complicated authorial intent. There are suggestions of a subliminal affinity between the narrator and the girl, and eventually Mantel forces an unlikely series of events that make this resonance between them cumbersomely explicit. It diminishes the impact of an otherwise powerful piece. After three years of planning, a time-bomb planted by Magee was detonated during the Conservative Party conference at the Grand Hotel on October 12, 1984, killing five people and injuring many more.

At any rate its counterpart, at the other end of the book, is based ( by Mantel's own account) in something more like wishful thinking. This time the intruder is an IRA assassin whom the narrator has mistaken for a plumber, and who wants to use the window of her flat to take a shot at Margaret Thatcher (this is also set in the 80s). As a result of Neave's assassination the INLA was declared illegal across the whole of the United Kingdom on 2 July 1979. [13] Memorial plaque to Airey Neave at his alma mater, Merton College, Oxford Later, the 1981 hunger strikes are described as the “animating force” that led to the Provisional IRA actively seeking revenge against the Prime Minister. Is that your great suggestion? They shoot me a bit further along the street? Okay, we'll give it a go. Exit along another line. A little surprise.'' The main impact of her first term was economic. Inheriting a weak economy, she reduced or eliminated some governmental regulations and subsidies to businesses, thereby purging the manufacturing industry of many inefficient—but also some blameless—firms. The result was a dramatic increase in unemployment, from 1.3 million in 1979 to more than double that figure two years later. At the same time, inflation doubled in just 14 months, to more than 20 percent, and manufacturing output fell sharply. Although inflation decreased and output rose before the end of her first term, unemployment continued to increase, reaching more than three million in 1986.Air in your system,'' he said. ''While I'm waiting I'll bleed it. Might as well. If you've got a key.'' The street itself describes a gentle curve, joining the main road as it flows out of town. The Holy Trinity church, islanded, is hung with garrison flags. Looking from a high window over the town (as I did that day of the killing) you feel the close presence of fortress and castle. Glance to your left, and the Round Tower looms into view, pressing itself against the panes. But on days of drizzle and drifting cloud the keep diminishes, like an amateur drawing half-erased. Its lines soften, its edges fade; it shrinks into the raw cold from the river, more like a shrouded mountain than a castle built for kings. I heard his long, smoker's cough. ''Oh, right, the tea,'' I said. ''But you know another thing? They may have been blind at the end, but their eyes were open when they went into it. You can't force pity from a government like hers. Why would she negotiate? Why would you expect it? What's a dozen Irishmen to them? What's a hundred? All those people, they're capital punishers. They pretend to be modern, but leave them to themselves and they'd gouge eyes out in the public squares.''

You know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller when, as here, some curious yet minor verbal oddity, some seeming rhetorical blip, turns out to be so cunningly related to a story’s metaphoric unfolding. True, there’s much more to “Comma” than I’ve let on: Mantel’s subtle depiction of the juvenile narrator’s relationship with sexy, wayward Mary; a couple of brilliant scenes involving the girls’ mothers; the chilling punctuation joke with which the story concludes. But, as with Edgar Allan Poe’s trademark tarns— those dark stagnant bodies of water mentioned in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and so many other Poe tales — the brown, lolling blebs of the Hathaways’ house might stand as an emblem of Mantel’s distinctive expertise: her ability to amplify mood and meaning through an eerie ramification of terms, her fine-tuned sensitivity (at times almost occult) to things sleek and dark and off-kilter. Yes, the images she deploys have a fairy-tale rightness about them in the moment (not that this makes them any less creepy), but they also have their roles to play, ineluctably, in some larger and unusually mordant verbal fantasia. The street itself describes a gentle curve, joining the main road as it flows out of town. The Holy Trinity church, islanded, is hung with garrison flags . Looking from a high window over the town (as I did that day of the killing) you feel the close presence of fortress and castle. Glance to your left, and the Round Tower looms into view, pressing itself against the panes. But on days of drizzle and drifting cloud the keep diminishes, like an amateur drawing half-erased. Its lines soften, its edges fade; it shrinks into the raw cold from the river, more like a shrouded mountain than a castle built for kings. Mantel said there were parallels between Thatcher and Thomas Cromwell, her main writing obsession, in that both were self made. Thatcher, though, hated the end result.

Thatcher 'barely escaped death'

The Daily Telegraph had refused to publish the story even after it paid a substantial sum to secure the exclusive rights.