We asked leading academic Dr Lucy Arnold, to explore Mantel’s complex relationship with Irish heritage, tracing how Irish history, memory and nationalism surface across her fiction and memoir.

‘It’s about Ireland. Only Ireland, right?’

”Everybody’s got an Irish granny. It’s no guarantee of anything at all. [. . .] I don’t care about the songs your bloody great-uncles used to sing on a Saturday night.” (p. 222)

With these words the would-be assassin of Hilary Mantel’s most famous short story dismisses his hostage’s claims to sympathy with the cause of Irish nationalism. Musing on this, Mantel’s protagonist admits that her relatives’ connection to their Irish heritage is superficial and fragmentary at best, alienated from significant cultural symbols and narratives. Irishness here is reduced to an excuse for drinking and ‘going la-la-la auld Ireland (because at this distance in time the words escape [them].’ (p. 223) This interrogation of what a connection to Ireland might mean, at a remove of several generations and across national boundaries, is one with which Mantel herself came to grapple, equivocally stating in her memoir Giving up the Ghost ‘I used to be Irish but I’m not sure now.’ (p. 36) An uncertain relationship with Ireland and Irishness forms a thread which runs through the author’s extensive corpus, at times explicitly foregrounded, at others forming a spectral presence within her text.

Mantel’s relations on her maternal grandmother’s side came from an extensive Irish Catholic family. In recounting this heritage Giving up the Ghost presents not a depoliticised or pan-Irish identity, but one which is obliquely aligned with a republican positioning. As is to be expected from an author who made an art of trusting her reader and refusing the obvious, this positioning registers in snatches of songs and recollected off hand comments. Early in the memoir Mantel recalls her great-aunt, Annie Connor announcement that ‘the thing she could not fail to hate was a Black and Tan. And for people of the Orange persuasion she can’t care’ (p. 43), following which she seizes her great-niece’s hand and sings with her the Irish street ballad ‘The Wearing of the Green’, a song lamenting the repression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798:

Oh I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand
He said how is Old Ireland, and how does old Ireland stand?
It is the most distressful countree, that ever yet was seen.
They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.(p.98)

Even here though, in a childhood memory which has a clear reference to Irish republicanism at its heart, the situation is complex. James Napper Tandy was notable for his long periods of exile from Ireland, in America and latterly France. As such the figure invoked here, while ostensibly central to an Irish nationalist popular imagination, is situated at a remove from Ireland itself. Nonetheless, in the young Mantel’s imagination, this figurehead of Irish republicanism asserts himself as part of the family: ‘For a long time, I thought Napper Tandy was something like a great-uncle. I thought he might show his face one day, creaking up from the bus stop and wanting a sandwich.’ (p. 98)

Clearly then, Mantel’s connection to and engagement with Irish history and culture significantly predates the explicit engagements we see in ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. Her most sustained evocation of Ireland and the emigrant Irish experience is found in her 1998 novel The Giant O’Brien, a work which re-imagines the life and death of historical figure Charles Byrne, the so-called ‘Irish Giant’. A sufferer of acromegalic gigantism, Byrne became a celebrity in the London of the 1780s due to his prodigious height. The novel is particularly striking for the way it awoke in Mantel an awareness both of an Irishness which had lain dormant in her for some years and of the ways in which she had been alienated from this part of her heritage. Speaking in an interview which accompanied the Fourth Estate edition of the novel, Mantel described a growing feeling that ‘in order to find myself I had to go back and capture that voice, that Irishness.’ This dislocation from her Irish roots latterly came to be understood by her particularly in terms of her lack of access to Irish as a language. Writing in an essay for a collection on modern British fiction, the author stated: ‘In the course of my writing I felt a great sadness about the loss, for me, of the Irish language. I was aware my mouth was empty.’

If The Giant O’Brien speaks to Irish histories of emigration and exploitation more broadly, the evocation of the cause of Irish nationalism and its contemporary manifestations is likewise not limited to ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. In the title story of Mantel’s short fiction collection Learning to Talk (2003), a throwaway comment by the narrator links the post-industrial north west of England to Northern Ireland: ‘All those places where people don’t talk proper look curiously alike driving through the everlasting soft grey blanket of rain, it is possible to imagine oneself in the suburbs of Belfast.’ (p. 93) In Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005), spirit medium Alison is plagued by the ghost of a man who is implied to be a murdered Irish paramilitary while she is trying to take an algebra exam:

When she reached question 5 the man began to break through. He said, look for my cousin John Joseph, tell our Jo that my hands are bound with wire. In spirit, even now, he had a terrible pain where the bones of his feet used to be, and that’s what he relied on her to pass on to his cousin, the knowledge of this pain [. . .] in the end the crushing of the rifle butts and the men’s boots seemed to drive her own feet through the scuffed vinyl tiles of the exam room. (p. 181)

However, possibly the most striking example of Mantel’s consideration of Irish nationalism, particularly in the form it took during the period which came to be known as the Troubles, is found in a relatively understudied short story ‘King Billy is A Gentleman’ whose protagonist, Liam, can be read as a forerunner of ‘The Assassination’s gunman, ‘Brendan’.

Initially, ‘King Billy’ reads as the recollection of a childhood conflict between neighbouring children who play out in miniature the sectarian divisions between local communities in an unspecified northern town.[1] Rapidly, Mantel explicitly places the conflict between Liam on the one hand and his next-door neighbours on the other in conversation with a history of militant republicanism. Liam and his sister are referred to by their neighbour as ‘Irish pigs’ and ‘bog hogs’, anti-Catholic slurs Liam’s reaction to which recapitulates the iconography of armed conflicts in the cause of a united Ireland: ‘Petrol ran in my veins; my fingers itched for triggers; post offices were fortified behind my eyes.’[2] Strikingly, when Liam complains of his ‘shrinking’ territory, home, school, garden and neighbourhood becoming increasingly hostile to him, he states of his own body: ‘All I owned was the space behind my ribs, and that too was a scarred battleground, the site of sudden debouchements and winter campaigns.’ (p. 13) This identification of the body as a site upon which nationalist conflicts may play out resonates strongly with the image of the Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland who went on hunger strike between 1980-81 (and to whom ‘The Assassination’s Brendan refers, their bodies ‘eating [themselves] in despair.’ (p. 231)). As the story’s denouement approaches, the Troubles are named explicitly, as the narrator describes ‘the newspapers [. . .] full of pictures of burnt-out shopkeepers, with faces like ours.’ (p. 17)

Now qualified as a lawyer, Liam makes an Easter visit to his family home (the timing of which evokes both the Easter 1916 Rising and the subsequent Good Friday Agreement of 1998). During this visit he learns that one of his childhood tormentors, Philip, was killed by his own homemade sugar and weedkiller bomb. Liam’s response to this death is striking. Considering his contemporary’s fate he muses that: ‘Ireland had undone him at last; and here I was still alive, one of life’s Provisionals, one of the men in the black berets.’ (p. 20) Towards the end of ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’, Mantel’s protagonist claims of another of the ‘men in the black berets’: ‘You’re no nearer the old country than I am.’ Perhaps ultimately it is this tension between proximity (geographical and temporal) and identification which is the key to beginning to understand the function of Ireland and Irishness in Mantel’s life and work, where the island of Ireland itself is almost always absent, making itself present through various stand-ins, through snatches of popular music, familial recollections and historic iconography.

1] The story takes its title from the street song ‘King Billy was a Gentleman’, which refers to William of Orange who ruled England, Ireland and Scotland between 1689-1702. The staunchly protestant monarch was particularly disliked among Irish Catholic nationalists due to his significant military intervention in Ireland against the Catholic Jacobite factions seeking to restore James I to the throne.

[2] The ‘post offices’ Liam imagines are a reference to the 1916 uprising in which the General Post Office in Dublin served as the headquarters for the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army.

Photograph: The shell of the G.P.O. on Sackville Street (later O’Connell Street), Dublin in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising.
Photographers, Keogh Brothers Ltd.,
Permission: National Library of Ireland on The Commons @ Flickr Commons