Who has not seen the door in the wall?
- aksmith304
- Jun 4, 2023
- 2 min read
Ines G. Labarta and I had a great time in sunny Galway last weekend running creative writing workshops at the library and the museum. Our focus was on speculative historical fiction, a subject close to our hearts. We asked our brilliant participants to think about the stories of their ancestors, how they might fill in parts they didn’t know and to speculate how these stories might have been different. We used a number of literary examples to illustrate this, but a key one was Hilary Mantel’s short story, ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - August 6th 1983’.
This story is a work of speculative fiction, after all we know that Margaret Thatcher was not assassinated in 1983. In the story an unnamed narrator lets a strange man into her flat believing him to be a there to repair her boiler. Instead, he turns out to be the assassin, and her bedroom window provides him an ideal vantage point from which to shoot the then Prime Minister. The rest of the story is built around the dialogue between the two, including a contemplation of what might happen after the event. Will the assassin let the narrator live and is there any way for him to escape capture following the deed? Then she shows hm the door in the wall and the beating heart of the story is revealed.
‘Who has not seen the door in the wall?’ the narrator asks the reader. It is the door through which we do not go. If we did, who knows how things might be different? ‘Once through it, you return as angles and air, as sparks and flame.’ This door, these doors represent all those other possibilities, all the roads we have not taken. ‘But note the door: note the wall: note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there.’ This is a foundation stone of alternative history, of speculative historical fiction. It is the possibility of infinite stories that we are yet to discover. ‘History could always have been otherwise’, Mantel reminds us, whether we are thinking about written history, the stories we tell or the events of our own lives. What if Margaret Thatcher really had been assassinated in 1983? How might the world be different?
This is the premise of my alternative history novel The Solace of the Common People. What if Richard III had defeated Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in 1485? Which doors in the wall might he have seen that Tudor did not notice? Might he have taken other, very different roads? ‘History could always have been otherwise.’ Finding those other alternative histories is an exciting process. We have all seen the doors. We have all wondered what is on the other side. These stories offer us ways to find out.
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