Hilary Mantel - Case Histories The Culture Show

We've come to think of Hilary Mantel as a historical novelist.

The phenomenal success of her books Wolf Hall

and Bring Up The Bodies has made her famous.

She's been made a dame.

Both of these vivid resurrections of the Tudor past

won the Man Booker Prize.

They've topped best-seller lists,

been turned into plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company,

enjoyed sell-out West End runs.

A BBC dramatisation of Wolf Hall will air next year.

But in Mantel's hands, history is a slippery thing.

Some of her other books live not in the past,

but in a mock-Tudor present that is surprisingly tense.

In novels such as Every Day Is Mother's Day

and Beyond Black, she's neatly skewered suburbia.

Now, the world awaits the third volume in the Wolf Hall series.

BELLS PEAL

In the meantime,

Hilary's given us this -

a collection of ten short stories provocatively titled

The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher.

The title story of the collection takes its starting point

from a day in 1983, when the then Prime Minister - Margaret Thatcher -

visited a private hospital in Windsor for a minor eye operation.

NEWSREADER: As she emerged from the hospital, Mrs Thatcher seemed to

hesitate for a moment as if readjusting to daylight.

She'll need to wear dark glasses for a few days

to protect her from bright lights.

At the time, Hilary was living in Windsor,

in a house with a view of the hospital car park.

"Picture first

"the street where she breathed her last.

"It is a quiet street...

"..sedate, shaded by old trees...

"..a street of tall houses, their facades

"smooth as white icing,

"their brickwork the colour of honey.

"Some are Georgian, flat fronted.

"Others are Victorian, with gleaming bays.

"They're too big for modern households,

"and most of them have been cut up into flats.

"But this does not destroy their elegance of proportion,

"nor detract from the deep lustre of panelled front doors,

"brass furnished and painted in navy or forest green.

"It's the neighbourhood's only drawback that there are more cars

"than spaces to put them."

In this story - The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher -

you posit the idea that, in 1983,

an IRA man comes into a house in Windsor

and potentially lines up to assassinate Mrs Thatcher.

Mm. Why are you telling this story?

Because I saw it happen, or I DIDN'T see it happen!

I stood there at the moment, at the window - very much as described -

saw Mrs Thatcher emerge from the building next door.

And then two things go on,

one is you are immediately in the body of a man with a gun

and your eyes measuring the distance. And the other thing is

you are in your writer's self and you think, "This is a story.

"But where to find it?"

It's taken me all these years to find the shape of the story.

And yet I knew immediately - there's a challenge.

Hilary, not everyone looking out of a room of their flat in Windsor,

seeing Mrs Thatcher coming towards a group of doctors and nurses,

would think about assassinating her.

There are plenty of people who would.

If you can rewind to the mood of 1983.

And were you one of them?

Well, what I do remember is a sobering, sensible, Windsor matron

putting down her bag of shopping on the wall and saying,

"I hate her. I HATE her."

So, as a writer, whatever your personal feelings are,

you want to know what is behind such a strong reaction.

And that is why I knew I must write the story, I must explore that.

The IRA assassin gains access to the woman's flat.

She realises what his intentions are, and that she agrees with them.

She shows him a way he can leave the flat covertly

after firing his shot - a door.

"Beyond the fire door he melts,

"and this is how you've never seen him on the news.

"This is how you don't know

"his name, his face.

"This is how, to your certain knowledge,

"Mrs Thatcher went on living till she died.

"But note the door: note the wall:

"note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there.

"And note the cold wind that blows through it,

"when you open it a crack.

"History could always have been otherwise.

"For there is the time, the place, the black opportunity:...

"..the day, the hour, the slant of the light,

"the ice-cream van chiming from a distant road near the bypass."

ICE-CREAM VAN CHIMES

Today, that Windsor hospital is being converted into flats.

And I'm sitting outside, in my car, thinking.

The story rises to a climax, but refuses to end.

It leaves us with the nightmarish possibility that somehow

it all might have happened.

A shot. A death.

A different history.

What would have happened if,

instead of some rather boring news footage,

Britain had its very own Zapruder footage,

I suppose, of an assassination of a serving prime minister in 1983?

And how would our society have been different?

How would we have lived differently?

How would our history have been seen differently

if a matter of a moment,

a matter of a few seconds, had changed everything?

And that's what I think Hilary Mantel is about.

It's about alternatives.

Different ways of seeing history

and also different ways of seeing reality,

a different way of thinking about history and reality.

"Who has not seen the door in the wall?

"It is the invalid child's consolation,

"the prisoner's last hope.

"It is the easy exit for the dying man,

"who perishes not in the death-grip of a rattling gasp,

"but passes on a sigh, like a falling feather.

"It is a special door and obeys no laws that govern wood or iron.

"No locksmith can defeat it, no bailiff kick it in,

"patrolling policemen pass it,

"because it is visible only to the eye of faith.

"Once through it,

"you return as angles and air, as sparks and flame."

In your fiction, there's often a door

that opens out into other possibilities.

And when we go through the door marked "Mantel",

we don't really know where we're going.

All we know is we're going to be challenged and threatened and...

Mantel doesn't know where we're going either! That's the point.

Why the door?

Why are there lots of doors in your work?

Yes. And the image of the door in the wall.

It isn't a question of always of liberation

into a world of possibilities.

You may find you've...you've just passed through into a mirror world.

So the symbol's equivocal...

..and the step into the unknown is what is important,

the courage needed.

And the question is not just what lies on the other side

of the door, but will I be different as I step over the threshold?

The answer might be simple - yes, it will, because you're dead.

It might be the frontier between life and death,

but it might be the frontier between obscurity and fame.

It might be really any number of...

of...of choices of...

this question of roads not taken.

I've used that...that metaphor also.

Um...

People not even born. It's not always a question of the dead,

but I say in my memoir:

"When the midwife says it's a girl, where does the boy go?"

When people think of names for their children before they are born,

who occupies the unused names?

These are all questions of frontiers, borders.

And I think, in those short stories,

say, in The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher,

people are crossing borders of various types

in the different stories.

That's true.

In this collection, children climb over fences uninvited.

A flirtation drifts towards adultery.

But the border that draws Hilary's eye most often

is the one between life and death.

The mortality figures in these pages are alarmingly high.

And once the dead are dead, how dead are they?

I wonder if we could talk about one story

in this new collection particularly,

which is Terminus, which begins with a woman

seeing her dead father on a train as it's leaving a station?

I think for short fiction I seem pathetically dependent on

what really does happen to me.

It seems to be far closer to my life

in derivation than my novels do.

So, yes, it did happen.

You saw your father? Look sideways

and see a man in an apparently...empty carriage

and just think, "Good God, that's my father."

Not as I left him, but in some sort of...

..intermediate state of being.

And the face looked - if you can understand me - in itself haunted.

So it was a ghost that was haunted.

And I then - like the woman in the story - went into London,

went to a meeting and thought, on my way home,

looking around at Waterloo Station...

.."Well, if there can be one dead person, maybe they're all dead.

"How do I know?"

PASSENGER ANNOUNCEMENT: The train currently at...

"For 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?

"That lost, objectless, sallow man,

"a foreigner with his bag on his back,

"that woman whose starved face recalls a plague-pit victim?

"Those dwellers in the brown houses of Wandsworth,

"those denizens of balcony flats and walkways, those grumbling commuters

"gathered for Virginia Water, those whose homes perch on embankments,

"or whose roofs glossy with rain fly away from the traveller's window?

"How many?

"For distinguish me, will you?

"Distinguish me 'the distinguished thing'.

"Render me the texture of flesh.

"Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice,

"that marks out the living from the dead.

"Show me a bone that you know to be a living bone.

"Flourish it, will you? Find one, and show me."

It was one of the few occasions where you sit down, write it...

..put down your pen and it's done.

And, actually, it's strange in its style,

it's strange in its rhythms but it had to be left just so.

Not something you could get into and say,

"Well, I'll just tweak this a little."

It is as it is. And that's not my usual process, as I've told you.

This was an idea to pin down something fleeting perhaps?

Yes. I think...

..it was to interrogate this mysterious moment.

Not to try to resolve it, just to live with the idea it'd implanted,

which is the idea that when you look around you,

how can you be sure what really distinguishes

the living from the dead?

"It's not generally agreed, it's not much appreciated,

"that people are divided by all sorts of things,

"and that, frankly, death is the least of them.

"When lights are blossoming out across the boulevards and parks,

"and the town assumes its Victorian sagesse, I shall be moving on again.

"I see that both the living and the dead commute,

"riding their familiar trains.

"I am not, as you will have gathered,

"a person who needs false excitement, or simulated innovation.

"I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable

"and take some new routes, and I know I shall find,

"at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine."

PASSENGER ANNOUNCEMENT: Customers who are now boarding...

These stories deprive us of our certainties.

The dead and the living are indistinguishable.

You can't be sure what you've seen.

In How Shall I Know You? a writer stays in a provincial hotel,

suffering from a migraine, and I can't help wondering.

I wanted to ask you about migraines.

Because, in one of your short stores for example,

a character has a migraine and there is a sort of migrainous imagination

at work in your fiction, I think, where things are slightly skewed.

Do you suffer from migraines? Well, I did.

Um...

I think...

..the...

Well, I could certainly say the problem's considerably eased

and I...

..I sometimes now find myself, interestingly...

..in the aura that precedes a migraine attack

without actually getting to the headache part.

But, yes, I mean you are quite right.

I-I-I think I've said somewhere that migraine is

an art form that I didn't recognise at one stage.

It is... It's a very mysterious condition

and I think that...

..there are probably more aspects to it,

more triggers for it than, you know, people commonly recognise.

It isn't just a bad headache.

No, it affects your whole vision and the way you see things.

Oh, but much more than that.

There's a whole diversity of neurological symptoms.

One of the ones I've found most interesting over the years,

distressing but also interesting,

is the sense of having a presence on my left-hand side,

approximately were you had your guardian angel

when you were a child.

And, though oppressive...

..it does give your life,

um, a sensation of...doubleness,

a sort of haunted quality.

You are not sure, you see, whether that presence is something else

or is it you slightly slipped out of focus?

It feels like both.

Then the attack's over and it's not there any more.

But for a writer, you see, it's gold.

The more you're suffering, the better it's going to be on the page.

It shouldn't surprise us at all that these ten short stories

bear close relationships to the novels that Hilary Mantel

has published in the last 30 years.

They open doors back into those longer fictions.

In Beyond Black the migraines and the lively dead

come together in the character of the psychic medium, Alison.

The uncouth ghosts who visit her manifest as migraines do - with

a flick, a glint in the peripheral vision that glows and grows.

And one of those ghosts that visits her is Lady Diana.

"At once Diana manifested: a blink in the hall mirror, a twinkle.

"Within a moment she had become a definite pinkish glow.

"She was wearing her wedding dress, and it hung on her now,

"she was gaunt, and it looked crumpled and worn,

"as if dragged through the halls of the hereafter,

"where the housekeeping, understandably,

"is never of the best.

"She'd pinned some of her press cuttings to her skirt,

"they lifted, in some other-worldly breeze, and flapped.

"She consulted them, lifting her skirts and peering,

"but, in Alison's opinion, her eyes seemed to cross.

"'Give my love to my boys,' Diana said.

" 'My boys, I'm sure you know who I mean.' "

I'm interested in these stories, and in Beyond Black,

because they deal with more recent history.

In Beyond Black, you talk about the unimaginable thing that was

the death of Princess Diana and how she haunts the present

and haunts the living who remain.

Is it more difficult or more interesting

to write about contemporary history than the Tudors, say?

I haven't done it in a big way, you see.

Mrs Thatcher enters the short story simply as the target.

She's seen but she does not speak.

Diana enters Beyond Black as a ghost.

I haven't in a bigger way engaged with contemporary figures

because...it's like journalism.

I don't know.

You see, I think you need a longer view, you need perspective,

it needs to turn into history.

It's not to say I'd never do it, but it has its own set of challenges.

I mean, you wouldn't do Churchill or Blair, for example?

I wouldn't feel constrained from doing it.

It's just that that novel hasn't happened yet.

There are only certain people you can work with, you know?

That's like a biographer choosing a subject,

or like making a friend in real life.

If you're going to write a novel about someone,

you have to be sure that your working partnership

can continue for some years.

So it's not a thing to choose lightly.

You talked about that migrainous imagination

and that whole issue of seeing things and feeling that presence.

I've known you for a relatively long time now

and you are the most well I've ever seen and known you.

Mm...

Is that all right? Do you miss being ill, as a writer?

There are a variety of ways to give yourself a really hard time,

to make sure that you suffer adequately.

And one of them is to take all the hours

that you used to spend being ill

and make sure you work yourself in to a state of quivering fatigue.

Actually, to be serious, what I've done with my abundant good health...

..comparatively speaking over the last few months,

is to set myself an even bigger agenda,

take on more and more projects.

I have more books planned. I have plays planned.

I feel really, in some respects, as if I'm beginning again.

But you're not a woman who believes in endings,

you always believe in beginnings.

Well, that's, er...

..that's how one of our plays ends.

You know, if you think this is an ending

you are deceived as to its nature - it's a beginning.

So, that's how I'm regarding this present phase.

"Summer 1536: he is promoted Baron Cromwell.

"He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh.

"However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon.

"He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy.

"The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair.

"It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen,

"and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin.

"There are no endings.

"If you think so you are deceived as to their nature.

"They are all beginnings.

"Here is one."

You've crossed a recent border into fame. How has that affected you?

It seems as though it is happening to somebody else really.

I wonder whether you write the story

The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher -

a very provocatively titled collection of short stories -

to resist becoming a national treasure?

It's worrying - the national treasure label.

It suggests an unchallenging cosiness.

We don't want that.

It's...well meant...

..but as soon as people begin to posit that,

you have to say to yourself, "Then what is this nation?

"Is this nation all it should be?"

There's a paradox here because...

..it's offensive to hang on to the name of rebel

after you've joined the establishment.

It's pretentious to pretend to be marginal when you're at the centre.

We're all familiar with the artist who wants to keep his street cred

but lives behind an immaculate, manufactured, Georgian facade

and bathes in champagne.

It's so hollow, it's so pretentious,

it really is offensive.

You need to look at where you are and acknowledge it.

And then, when you find yourself standing on that centre ground

and all seems right and secure,

that is the moment to pick up a spade

and begin digging away the ground beneath your feet.

Because you could have turned down being a dame, I suppose.

But what would be the point of that?

Well, you could've retained your marginal status.

Well, I think if that was the only way you could do it

it'd be pretty hollow,

because people would think you were a dame anyway.

Have you started behaving like a dame?

Oh, definitely. Yes.

Yes. Yes, I have.

You've become grand. You can't be teased.

I have become extremely grand.

I refer to myself in the third person now.

Dame Hilary's schedule is rather full.

Well, you see, I said that is how you deal with it -

you pretend it's happening to somebody else.

I get up in the morning and I put on...

I put on my dame face.

I'm good to go!

But that means you can't be teased any more!

Oh, I don't know.

I think you're doing it now and I think I'm doing it back.

Right!

And that pen you're holding, you're not going to put it down.

No.

I said a little while ago...

.."Early in your life there's a phrase in your head -

"choose your weapons."

And this is it.

Thank you.