‘La divine Thatcher’: how novelists responded to Maggie

For some fiction writers she was the enemy, for others she was spellbinding and highly attractive. How have Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Anthony Powell, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter and others got to grips with the iron lady?

How novelists interpreted Thatcher. Photograph: Guardian

DJ Taylor

Friday 19 June 2015 

Anyone embarking on a crash-course in the literary politics of the 1980s is advised to begin with an article that Salman Rushdie contributed to the New Statesman on the eve of the 1983 general election. The tone, as Rushdie concedes, is practically Spenglerian, its basis the idea that all that is worst in a nation’s identity will ever so often slither to the surface and express itself in government. “There are, of course, many Britains, and many of them – the sceptical, questioning, radical, reformist, libertarian, non-conformist Britains – I have always admired greatly,” Rushdie declares. “But these Britains are presently in retreat, even in disarray; while nanny-Britain, strait-laced Victorian values Britain, thin-lipped jingoist Britain, is in charge. Dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air.”

It sounded stirring at the time, but unlike, let us say, the late Stuart Hall – a paid-up anti-Conservative who was sharp enough to comprehend Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to a substantial percentage of the electorate – Rushdie is less interested in trying to establish why more than 13 million people, not all of them thin-lipped jingoists or the handmaidens of dark goddesses, would go on to vote Tory a few days later than in simply venting his disapproval. At the same time, nothing could be more redolent of the literary landscape of the early 1980s, a deeply divided and monumentally contested age, in which for the first time in nearly half a century writers found their political opinions a subject of consuming interest to the world at large.
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