HOW I KILLED MARGARET THATCHER by Anthony Cartwright (Tindal Street Press, 2012)
Tindal Street Press, based at The Custard Factory in Birmingham, is a not-for-profit independent publishing house that was first established in 1998. Its mission is to seek out contemporary regional writers to counteract the bias towards London or South-East England.
One of these is Anthony Cartwright and they have published his previous two novels – The Afterglow (2004) and Heartland (2009).
The title of this promising writer’s third work is misleading. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that neither Cartwright nor his fictional alter ego Sean Bull actually succeed in assassinating Margaret Thatcher. ‘How I would have dearly liked to have killed Margaret Thatcher’ would be a more accurate, but much less eye-catching, title.
The novel documents a young boy’s harsh political and social education, the direct consequence of coming of age under Thatcher’s iron regime.
Cartwright was born in Dudley and this is where the novel is set, a location described in the novel as being “the frayed edge of the empire”. The Midlands was once the industrial heartland of England and was one of the regions most devastated by the cynical and divisive Tory policies. Continue reading
The cause of addiction is that the drugs work all too well when you first take them.
