Carefully crafted bigotry - a comment on Hilary Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

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Hilary Mantel, I'm told, writes historical fiction. I haven't read anything that she has written before today.I am unlikely to read anything she has written or will write in the future.

However, Ms Mantel has written a little short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is defending herself from the criticism that her writing inevitably precipitated. Now, I've no real issue with Ms Mantel writing such a story, just so long as she is willing to countenance counterfactual history written from a perspective that challenges her prejudices (which I somehow doubt - imagine a story where the assassination of JFK failed and he led the US into WWIII or one where Nelson Mandela was executed for terrorism).

However, her defence (or at least the part quoted in The Guardian) is something of a confused concoction:

“I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating."

The first sentence is fine. Of course we can contemplate why someone might want to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, we don't have to go far to understand that mindset because a man who actually did try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher is alive, well and living in freedom (which says a great deal about our society). However, the second sentence - from someone who has made a fortune from exploiting history - displays a profound misunderstanding of even some history within my living memory. It is Ms Mantel who is running away from history, choosing instead a slanted rewrite formed out of prejudice rather than a real analysis.

In the end all this is fine - I've read the story and it's filled with the sort of bien pensant hatred we've come to expect from the UK's literary elite. It gives us a sort of stage Scouse Irishman as a suitable mirror to Mantel's personal hatreds, a kind of justification for her carefully crafted bigotry:

''It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It's the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?''

As an analysis of Margaret Thatcher this is useless but as a revealing insight into Hilary Mantel's hateful bigotry it is really valuable. Everything about the paragraph resonates with the dismissal of an inferior (Thatcher) by her superior (Mantel). Just as the working class man in Ms Mantel's little story is shallow, cardboard, a thing to be patronised, Margaret Thatcher is provincial, suburban, a little bit ordinary. In both cases unlike Hilary Mantel. But the working-class terrorist is portrayed as a victim whereas the lower middle-class shopkeeper's daughter who became prime minister is the villain.

Speaking personally, I find it hard to contemplate creating a false history purely from blind - and ignorant - hatred. Not the fictional vehicle of a conversation between a terrorist and a women whose home he'd barged into - that's a fine basis for a short story. The blind and ignorant hatred is the caricature of Margaret Thatcher, the view that this is the sort of women - indeed Ms Mantel can barely call her a women - who is so unlike me as to be a monster. Ms Mantel goes on and on about how Margaret Thatcher wouldn't like her hair, how she doesn't like the way Thatcher walks, her handbag - she casts herself as some sort of Anti-Thatcher, as a thing entirely built from the PM's disapproval.

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

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Ray Bradbury remembered...

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“The October Country” is perhaps the most frightening book I ever read – forget all the jumping out from behind things, zombies and ghosts that make for horror these days, Ray Bradbury was the master. To take you from idyllic, almost perfectly described Elysium to abject terror in one short story – that is writing.

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

The reports of Bradbury’s death will doubtless speak mostly of “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles” – great science fiction. For me Ray Bradbury’s work was far closer to that small town horror we now associate with Stephen King – tales of growing up, loose autobiographical references interlaced with scares, spells and magics. And all written so tightly, with a painful beauty.

I shall go read them again – “Dandelion Wine”, “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and all those wonderful short stories. It would be the best way to remember a great writer who gave us magic, fantasy and science fiction rooted in the lives of ordinary people and showed how that so-often dismissed “genre” fiction is about more than spaceships or dragons.

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The Giant Malaysian Killer Chicken - story and the limits of skepticism

Readers may not be aware but Bolton Abbey – more specifically Strid Wood - is the last known habitat of the Giant Malaysian Killer Chicken (you may glimpse it in the picture above if you look carefully). It has been a few years since the last sighting of this elusive avian; indeed some suggest that the Killer Chicken is an invention, an artifice created merely to annoy a small child.

What is important though isn’t the provenance of the bird in question – after all you have to do something to occupy the minds of seven-year-olds who reject the concept of walking, even walking through a glorious English wood. Rather, it is the importance of stories – even stories that the intended target (the seven-year-old) wishes you’d shut up about.

I remember once being told – by a scientist no less – that fiction was a waste of time. Even more that it led to people getting the wrong idea. And, as is so often the case with such sceptical folk, this scientist cited creation stories – or “creationism” as he preferred to call it. Apparently, by teaching these stories to children, we are corrupting them and turning them into anti-science religious maniacs (I exaggerate but only slightly).

Such people struggle – for reasons that escape me – with the ideas that there is more to truth than scientific fact and that stories, even weird creation stories, have a valid truth in them. This one – from Assyrian mythology – is among my favourites since it involves the slaying of a dragon:

So were the enemies of the high gods overthrown by the Avenger. Ansar's commands were fulfilled and the desires of Ea fully accomplished. Merodach strengthened the bonds which he had laid upon the evil gods and then returned to Tiamat. He leapt upon the dragon's body; he clove her skull with his great club; he opened the channels of her blood which streamed forth, and caused the north to carry her blood to hidden places. The high gods, his fathers, clustered around; they raised shouts of triumph and made merry. Then they brought gifts and offerings to the great Avenger.

Merodach rested a while, gazing upon the dead body of the dragon. He divided the flesh of Ku-pu, and devised a cunning plan.

Then the lord of the high gods split the body of the dragon like that of a mashde fish into two halves. With one half he enveloped the firmament; he fixed it there and set a watchman to prevent the waters falling down.  With the other half he made the earth. Then he made the abode of Ea in the deep, and the abode of Anu in high heaven. The abode of Enlil was in the air.

The point of these stories is not merely to explain how the world came to be or even to describe mankind’s role in that world. Rather the story more often seeks to explain how “good” and “evil” interact and how we, as men, are corrupted. So the core of creation stories define a morality – whether this one in which Tiamet, the dragon slain to make the word, has aspects of good (the world’s creatrix) and evil (the serpent) or those we are more familiar with such as the Adam and Eve story.

Fiction - the making up of stories – is important if we are to allow our morals, what we see as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, to be understood. We know that the setting down of rules – the lawyers’ obsessiveness that gave us Leviticus and the accountants’ passion that brought Numbers – do not define our moral purpose or even, in that phrase of Mums everywhere, the difference between right and wrong.

The skeptic rejects story – This goes in part to explain the dry dullness of his chosen belief system – preferring instead the idea (a delightfully fictional idea) that truth and understanding derive from a thing called “empirical enquiry” and from that enquiry alone.

Skepticism ... is an approach to claims akin to the scientific method. It is a powerful and positive methodology (a collection of methods of inquiry) that is used to evaluate claims and make decisions. It is used to search for the (provisional) truth in matters and to make decisions that are based on sound reasoning, logic, and evidence. Skepticism is based on a simple method: doubt and inquiry. The idea is to neither initially accept claims nor dismiss them; it’s about questioning them and testing them for validity. Only after inquiry does a skeptic take a stance on an issue.

I see no place in this for story, for wonderment or for the learning that comes from telling an intelligent seven-year-old that Strid Wood is the habitat of a giant killer chicken. Some will observe the contradiction between arriving at a ‘stance on an issue’ through reasoning and through ‘doubt and inquiry’, via scientific method. But that would be to play games of logic with the core belief of a faith – in this case ‘skepticism’.

Story-making and story-telling must be central to our culture, to deny fiction is to deny an essential element of humanity. To characterise stories as ‘childish’ or ‘misleading’ is to misunderstand the power of those stories, the manner in which speculation, creation and change is driven by dreams and hopes rather than by the dry exploration of something “akin to the scientific method”.

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