- Authors: Hilary Mantel
- Where I bought this book: Arcadia Books, Spring Green, Wisc.
- Why I bought this book: Her other collection was titled and included the story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
*******
The settings in these short stories, mostly about childhood, are benign; the colors are grey; the tales are ordinary.
Indeed, the collection is pure British. Its tone, its inflections and its manner says, quite politely yet determinately, that this is a British book of British stories.
None of that is surprising. Its author is one of the finest writers in Britain today. Mantel is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, and her latest book -- the finale in her trilogy of the years of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII -- was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
This is one of her earlier books, published in 2003, and her first of just two collections of short stories.
Many of the stories appear to be almost autobiographical, and that is not an accident. In her forward, Mantel says the tales are part of her life, but are not her real life.
I would not describe these stories as autobiographical, more as autoscopic. From a distant, elevated perspective, my writing self is looking down at a body reduced to a shell, waiting to be fleshed out by phrases.
Among my favorite tales is King Billy is a Gentleman, in which a Catholic lodger replaces the father in a household, and the tale explores some of the sectarianism in British life. The Clean Slate shows the failures of the perspectives of the past to tell a true story. It contains the great line about a couple of Irish uncles: "They drank when they had money, and prayed when they had none."
Third Floor Rising, about a mother who gains confidence when she goes to work in a Manchester department store, and her daughter, who does not, has the stock on the floor as major characters.
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