By Hilary Mantel (2014)
This is a patchy collection of stories. I only liked three of them. Lots of reviews don’t like all of them, though amusingly they all differ in which ones they think are good. Here’s the review that I agreed with most. James Lasdun in the Guardian.
I read the collection to see what I could learn from Mantel about short stories. I have learnt what I don’t like as much as what I do. That still feels like progress. And she writes beautifully on a line by line basis, that’s a treat.
Here’s what I think about each story:
Sorry to disturb: started life as a memoir, apparently. It’s a claustrophobic tale of a wife trapped in an ex-pat home in Saudi in 1983, neither fish nor fowl. Even now, years later when she recounts letting a man into the flat, she can’t explain the situation to herself. She ends up asking her husband to deal with him, which goes against all her western feminist values. The husband is silent throughout – is it the flat or the marriage that is claustrophobic?
I loved this SO MUCH. It’s open ended, evocative, lovely.
Comma is set in 1976 and perfectly evokes that hot summer. Two girls spend endless days together. Mary, the narrator’s friend, belongs to a feral family, looked down on by the respectable poor of the village – they don’t even have bedding, says the narrator’s Aunty, scandalised. They spy on a rich house, where they see some kind of disabled child, ‘a comma’ but the comma is wrapped in a blanket and is cared for. Mary gets carted off to special school and, much later, the narrator sees her as an adult, pushing a pram full of clothes – a bag lady. Mary threw a stone at the ‘comma’ in the wheelchair, the narrator threw lies around the village (via her aunt) about Mary.
This seeps into you as a story, there’s no easy resolution. Who did what, to whom, exactly? Would you rather be Mary, or the Comma?
The Long QT – Man snogs woman in his kitchen, wife comes in, has heart attack, man devastated. I hated this. It’s very slight, almost ‘tales of the unexpected’ plotting.
Winter break – husband and wife on holiday, travelling in cab. Husband vile, wife wishes she’d had children. Taxi hits a bump in the road ‘a kid’ says husband – there are wild goats. Cabbie loads it into boot, to have as roadkill she assumes. At end, wife thinks (guess what) she sees a child in boot. The writing is evocative, you feel the shock at the end but you kind of see it coming. I pretty much hated this one too, but not as much as:
Harley Street – present tense narrator is too thick to realise she’s describing one of her co-workers as a VAMPIRE (it’s like being at a pantomime – ‘She’s behind you! BEHIND YOU!’)
I hated Harley Street most of all.
Offences against the person: Girl works for lawyer dad in summer, realises he’s having an affair with his intern. Mother pale and insipid, cooks ‘brown’ food. Next holiday job – intern finds dad at court and tells him big news (guess what? She’s pregnant). Last we see, dad and intern have taken on crap life of mother – there’s brown food on the hob. The mother’s taken up yoga and is having a lovely time. Narrator still unsatisfied. There’s some nice touches in this, but still … meh.
How shall I know you? – there’s lots of great observation in this, but it broadly comes down to the narrator feeling sorry for and superior to a bunch of grotesques, then realising later she’s seen that way by someone else. A lot of reviewers like this one, but I didn’t feel like I wanted to read it again, so it’s a ‘not really’ from me.
The Heart Fails without warning. I do really like this one, though it’s had mixed reviews. Morna has anorexia. Her younger sister is not terribly sympathetic – there’s a lot of brutal chat. I think this is quite realistic, I was quite brutal when I was 11 – I think children are. Their family is dysfunctional, as we are shown in a series of scenes. They discover their Dad’s porn – debasing women to look like dogs on a lead. Is it any wonder Morna doesn’t want to be a grown up? (That’s never once said, we are just allowed to think it. That’s a real strength of the story). Morna dies, but haunts her sister in a kind of transcendent image at end – holding a ghost dog (the one Lola wasn’t ever allowed to have) ‘like a unicorn’, on a gold chain. Open ended, beautiful, unsettling.
Terminus – narrator sees dead father on a train whilst she too is travelling into London Waterloo. She wants to see him again and goes searching. He’s nowhere. I mean, that’s literally it. Disappointing.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – lots of clever, sharply observed elements, with the lurid fantasy of a morphine induced dream (which I read is how Mantel wrote it – in hospital, on painkillers).
I was vaguely irritated by the initial conceit, but the humour kept me going – all these ladies, terribly engaged in a ‘shall I bring a picnic to the revolution’ kind of a way.
Then a sniper turns up instead of the boiler man and takes up position in the narrator’s bedroom. That’s all sharply observed, the various hypocrisies. The chat between middle class lady and sniper is clarifying too – he’s not doing it because he doesn’t like Mrs. Thatcher’s hair, or her handbag, it’s the policies in Ireland he has a problem with.
So the narrator has a dilemma of a nicely twee British sort – she did say she’d like Thatcher dead, but does she want it to happen from her bedroom? She isn’t particularly bothered by the Irish question, one senses. On the other hand, one wouldn’t want to offend a trained assassin.
There’s a nice comedy of manners building up here, in an Alan Bennett type way. Then she offers to show him an escape route for after the assassination and leads him to a door. Which may only be a concept, not a door. It’s a door between probabilities. Or is it? At which point I got profoundly irritated.
Just waving 