Who else writes in such images — images that at once stop a paragraph in its tracks and also advance our psychological understanding of what's going on? Mantel's curious metaphors and violent verbs are themselves things of beauty: a noisy air conditioner is said to be "rattl[ing] away like an old relative with a loose cough"; a nervous taxicab passenger remarks on a "seat belt sawing into her throat"; a meaty meal kept warm for a wandering husband is described as a "brown dinner that ... shrivel[ed] to a stain in its ovenproof serving dish."
In what I think of as the best story in this collection, the one called How Shall I Know You, a woman pulls up at a hotel which doesn't quite measure up to its glossy brochure. She comments to herself: "What I had taken to be stucco was in fact some patent substance newly glued to the front wall: it was grayish-white and crinkled, like a split-open brain, or nougat chewed by a giant." That story starts out as a witty farce about a writer who accepts an invitation to lecture on her books at a book club in some dismal burg, but it curls round into something richer and stranger altogether: a chill meditation on the hierarchy of pity.
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A writer would have to be in absolute control of her language in order to successfully pull off an assassination fantasy featuring a recent real-life public figure, which is, of course, what the title story here is. Our female narrator recalls how, in August of 1983, she foolishly opened the door to a man she thought was a plumber; instead he's an assassin who wants to use her kitchen window to take aim at the then Prime Minister. The tone is at once droll and terrifying; Mantel is playing around with the theme of choices or doors that people walk through in life; she's also explicitly venting her rage at Thatcher. That she manages to do all this — juggle the metaphorical meditations and political commentary in a darkly comic short story — is breathtaking, which is the word I'd use to describe this collection.
Read an excerpt of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher