The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014)

Hilary Mantel is one of those names forever afloat in the writersphere, a writer who participates in more than a couple of literary genres and has pet fascinations with the history of her people, most notably the low-born Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII's fixer before Cromwell's own fixing in 1540.

I knew of Mantel's interests before reading her, and I am reading her now -- a 2014 collection of stories I picked up at the East Hastings Value Village, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Yet another instance of the author making something (lethal) of power -- what it does to ye, what ye get for wading into it.

The opening story, "Sorry to Disturb", is set in Saudi Arabia, where the narrator's husband (like Mantel's own? a geologist?) has been sent. Until recently, we would read this story for what transpires between the narrator and the Arabic-speaking "Asian" man who comes to her door for assistance, and from then on makes a succession of return visits (I am reminded of the janitor in Alice Munro's early short story "The Office"), but since 2016 or so many more of us read to see how a white woman writes about a white woman living with her white husband in an autocratic Islamic country.

I have nine pages left in this 36-page story, and so far my marginalia is focused not on Mantel the storyteller but on Mantel the anthropologist. In one instance, while the narrator is sweeping up the street dust that blows against her apartment door, she relates how her "male Saudi neighbour would come down from the first floor on the way out to his car and step over my brushstrokes without looking at me, his head averted." Her explanation? "He was according me invisibility, as a mark of respect to another man's wife."

A couple pages later, when she foreshadows the bad end that comes of her "relationship" with her accidental visitor, she writes: "This is where it began to go wrong -- my feeling that I must bare out the national character he had given me, and that I might not slight him or refuse a friendship, in case he thought it was because he was a Third Country National."

But is the narrator wrong in this respect? Or is she simply an empathetic person who would break from her writing (the narrator is also a writer) to indulge someone who originally called on her out of need? Would it have been "better" for her to remind the caller of the inappropriateness of his visits, given that her husband is always out when he stops by? Or would that have been too scary? Scary for whatever wrath her refusal might incur (more than English condescension) or scary because she would be speaking not as an autonomous human being but as someone else's wife?