Stephen Games writes
We wrote in our last issue about our misgivings with the BBC’s television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series and the inconsistencies with which the producers had handled issues of authenticity.
(Thank you to Alf Manders, Theresa Lancing and others for your letters following up on our comments. Book prizes to all, if you ping us an email and say which EnvelopeBook you’d like sent to you. See www.envelopebooks.co.uk.)
Hilary Mantel seems to be haunting us again, because we now want to raise another issue that troubles us and which, this time, focuses directly on her.
Mantel, by any standards, was one of the UK’s foremost literary darlings. She was highly in demand at literary festivals and in bookshops for signings. She won the Booker Prize twice. The BBC feted her by giving her the 2017 Reith Lectures. At most literary magazines, she could do no wrong.
What are we to make, then, of her short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher––August 6th 1983, which the Guardian published in full in 2014, and which was then brought out by Fourth Estate, in a hardback and then paperback collection of ten short stories under the same title?
And what are we make of the reception that it got? I continue to be bothered.
According to the publicity, if I read it right, Hilary Mantel was so enraged by Thatcher during her premiership that she even wondered whether assassination might be an appropriate response. She then wrote a story, set in 1983, in which an assassination actually occurs.
The defence of this was partly that all is fair in love and fiction, and I’m fine with that. What I’m still not fine about is the dignifying of the idea that killing or any form of extreme violence is legitimate in the face of a political opponent engaged in policies with which one disagrees, even if one contrives to carry it off with humour.
Mantel’s view at the time appeared to be that Thatcher’s evil was so heinous that the only reasonable response was hatred and, consequently, the extreme measures that hatred gives rise to. More than that: that the proof of Thatcher’s evil was the violence of the rage that it inspired: to rephrase this, that the proof of Thatcher’s evil was the fact that a good and moral person like Mantel could be roused to a violence that went way beyond how we thought of her and how she thought of herself––normally such a mild, kindly person.
This was terrible, and I’m still not sure that Mantel knew it was terrible, but I can give three illustrations from other contexts that serve as parallels.
I once heard the radical Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at a rally in Fresno, California. At one point, he put a rhetorical question to the whole Jewish world: “What did you do,” he asked, “to make Hitler hate you so much?” Mantel’s short story asks the same question of Thatcher: “What did you do to make me hate you so much?” The hatred and what comes of it, in other words, is regarded as a justified response to an otherwise unanswerable provocation.
The same defence was offered by ISIS when it first challenged the West. “What did you do, America, or Western capitalism, or imperialism, to make us hate you so much?” ISIS’s view was that its response to the West, however barbaric, could not be compared with the evil that had caused it; indeed, that ISIS was wholly excusable because its barbaity was the only reasonable response––the response of a victim pushed beyond his or her endurance. This is the now-increasingly-popular Frantz Fanon gambit.
And the third example? That of opponents of Israel in the Palestinian and Arab and, regrettably, wider Islamic and academic worlds: “What did you do, Israel, to make us hate you so much?” If we maintain a continuous policy of aggression towards you, that’s OK because of what you have done to us. In fact, it is proof of your evil that we––the innocents of Palestine and the surrounding 430 million Arabs and billion Muslims––have been roused to such anger. We’re good people, nice people, “generous people who have lost almost everything” (to quote the BBC’s Jon Donnison): only an evil as intense as yours could have made us feel so bad that wiping you out becomes the only answer and the right answer.
This, of course, was the Jenny Tong argument and the David Ward argument and the George Galloway argument. Negotiation and conventional politics don’t apply because your evil only warrants one reaction: our murderous rage.
It was a gross distortion of political logic and should have brought all of us up short. We were afraid of what might happen when radicalised Islamists went off to Sudan or Syria or Afghanistan to train and then imported their radicalism back to the West. It didn’t occur to us that a copycat form of radicalisation had already infiltrated our own nice, polite, liberal intelligentsia: the people many of us grew up with and considered our friends; the people who featherbedded Hilary Mantel and sat at her feet.
If you’re in any doubt, go back and read Mantel’s story in the Guardian online (Friday 19 Sep 2014) and review the enthusiastic comments it generated. And then call the children in from outside, lock the doors and worry.