Paperback review: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, by Hilary Mantel, by Helen McCarthy to In the Beginning was the Sea, by Tomas Gonzalez

Also The End of Days, by Jenny Erpenbeck, Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light and Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, by Helen McCarthy

Thatcher's government tried to reign in the power of unions during her time in power in the 1980s (Getty) (Getty)

Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, by Helen McCarthy

As Helen McCarthy notes in her excellent history of British women in the rarefied world of high diplomacy: “Women were everywhere and nowhere.” In the early days, they were largely the wives of diplomats, men drawn from the aristocracy, educated at the “right” schools and universities, able to socialise in the expected way. When Charles Howard Smith at the Foreign Office asked, in 1933, if it was time to introduce female diplomats, a flood of horror engulfed him.

But in amongst the stories of individual women who subverted misogynistic views, such as the intrepid Gertrude Bell, at one time Britain’s only female official in Iraq, there are those of men who did see the value of women in the diplomatic service. Warren Fisher, head of the Civil Service, even argued in 1929 that letting women in “is a very small compensation for having kept women down for century after century”.

Women needed help from men like Fisher to break into the exclusive boys’ club that was foreign diplomacy. Freya Stark broke through on her own but remained on the margins, occasionally aided by senior officials. Mary Galbraith also needed a “guide and protector” in the early days of her career. But the immediate post-war period saw a demand for, and influx of, young women, although as McCarthy shows, they were largely from the same kind of middle-class background as their male contemporaries. In 1971, they could still be asked at interview, what will you do if you want to get married?

McCarthy shines an important light on an area where women are still to make headway today, and also on what are still regarded as traditionally “feminine” qualities. It’s a deceptively quiet battle-cry of a history, thoughtfully and deeply researched.

The End of Days, by Jenny Erpenbeck

A worthy winner of The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015, Erpenbeck’s echoing story of a single woman’s multiple lives, constantly doubling back and mirroring and doing all those things that disrupt our sense of reality, while also stabilising it with repetitions, is often spell-binding. Separated into five “books”, each “book” bar one begins with death, or a rumination on death. We begin with the death of a baby girl, and what that does to the young couple who experience the loss of her; the second book shows what might have happened had she survived and grown up. The third takes us on further through the girl’s life, as Erpenbeck also tracks the changes in Europe’s borders, the political upheavals that turn lives upside down. It’s an inventive way of exploring both the personal and the political, as tiny details flower into larger statements, and the vulnerability of her central character’s life, established right at the beginning, is forever present during that exploration. It’s the kind of demanding novel that bears, and rewards, repeat reading.

Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light

Alison Light keeps her powder dry in this personal history of her family, quietly going about the story of the peripatetic lives of her father’s ancestors, traced through his mother’s line, before exploding into the upsetting and often devastating history of her mother’s antecedents, which involves workhouses and asylums. In this way she shows two different sides to poverty and humble backgrounds: the one side that shows endless hard work, occasionally rewarded, and the other side, which shows despair and neglect and what happens to those people when there is no one to care for them. In that respect, it’s an extremely powerful social history as well as a personal one, beautifully and sensitively handled by Light.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, by Hilary Mantel

The psychological brilliance of Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is perhaps less obvious in this collection of short stories which span her writing career from 1993 to the present. The title story, which caused so much fuss, concerns an IRA gunman, poised to kill Margaret Thatcher as she emerges from a hospital, and the too-sympathetic woman whose house he occupies, a house which gives him the best vantage point. There’s a tendency in Mantel to want to wrap up these stories a little too neatly, not to leave us in any doubt, which is strange when the workings of the human mind, as she shows so well in her historical novels, are often deeply unknowable.

In the Beginning was the Sea, by Tomas Gonzalez

Gonzalez’s tale is on the well-worn theme of outsiders in a new landscape which ends up threatening their very sanity. It’s a plotline often used in horror and Gonzalez, while avoiding the easy exploitation of horror moments, still gives a slight nod to that genre. Too-confident J, and his partner Elena, find their lives becoming gradually more and more intolerable once they land on the Caribbean island where they intend to live their new lives. There are echoes of John Fowles’s The Magus, too, in the way that the environment and the heat conspire to increase the couple’s lust for one another, while at the same time breaking down their capacity for reason. Ultimately, it’s a little too predictable, a little too similar to what has gone before.