'Gruesomely compelling' - The bomb that almost killed Mrs Thatcher

Presented by the Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson, the series sought to offer up a context for the bombing, reminding us of the IRA’s hatred of Thatcher in the wake of the Hunger Strike and the Brighton Bomber Patrick Magee’s own psychohistory and involvement in the bombings on Bloody Friday in Belfast in 1972 (which Patterson himself watched from the top of the slide in his local swing park in the city).

But throughout the week’s programmes we were constantly reminded that behind a panel on the bath in Room 629 of Brighton’s Grand Hotel there was a timer ticking down to zero from the moment it was placed there three weeks, three days, six hours and 36 minutes before by Magee himself.

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, after the bombing (Image: PA) Hold that thought for a moment. Last week I was in Wigtown for the book festival and I was talking to the Northern Irish poet Emma McKervey. She’s got a great new poetry out entitled Highland Boundary Fault, which traces the love story of her great grandparents from the Outer Hebrides to the Greenock shipyards and she tells their story very well.

But, to be honest, sitting in the Writer’s Retreat we defaulted to other stories even though we tried not to. We ended up talking about the Troubles.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the stories we choose to tell about Northern Ireland and, maybe too, about the stories we are allowed to. Does the rest of the UK want to hear Northern Irish stories that aren’t Troubles-related? What about those of us who grew up there during that time?

Can we even talk about post-Troubles stories when the forces animating those years are still at work? Is the recent Kneecap movie an example of how far they still seep through even in a story that takes place in contemporary Northern Ireland?

Lots of questions and I’m not sure I have any answers, though I could point you in the direction of the short stories of Lucy Caldwell, say, or Wendy Erskine, as examples of writers whose work inhabits a 21st-century Northern Irish landscape marked as much by feminism, immigration and austerity as identity politics.

(Glenn Patterson, by the way, has also written novels that range far and wide beyond that historical moment between 1968 and 1998.) Still, the long-delay timer of those years continues to count down through the present as this Radio 4 series reminds us.

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The result in this case had a weight to it, in part because of Alan Hall’s impeccable sound design and in part because of Patterson’s restrained yet engaged narration.

But also, it has to be said, because throughout we are waiting for the timer to count down to zero, at which point we know what happens, at which point we are reminded of what gelignite does, to people, to bodies, whether it smells of marzipan or not.

Friday’s episode, which covered events just before and just after the bomb exploded in Room 629, is both ominous and horrifying by turns because, well, how could it be otherwise?

This Radio 4 series, as well as being an impressive summary of a moment in history, is also gruesomely compelling for all the predictable reasons. And maybe there’s a wider problem in that. The messy, partial, contingent peace Northern Ireland has been dealing with in the last three decades is inherently less dramatic than the clarity of murder.

Is that why we keep telling these old stories? Because deep down we all love the drama?

In other news, 6 Music opted for a “Slow Sunday” theme last weekend. It peaked (for me at any rate) in the Now Playing teatime slot which saw Matt Everitt sitting in for Tom Robinson and playing nothing but ambient tunes from the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Brian Eno and the KLF.

For a couple of hours it was like being back in the noughties listening to Chill FM on my first digital radio.

Hanif Kureishi at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (Image: Simone Padovani/Awakening)

Listen Out For:

This Cultural Life, Radio 4, Thursday, October 17, 11am

John Wilson talks to author Hanif Kureishi about his influences and life after the accident that left him paralysed in December 2022.