It is the right time, and the wrong time, for Maggie And Me, a memoir about Margaret Thatcher and small-town Scotland.
It's the right time because in the past couple of weeks we have all been talking about the former Prime Minister again; it's the wrong time, because most of us have started to get a little bit tired of talking about her.
Fortunately, Maggie And Me by Damian Barr has a startling new take on the former PM: Margaret Thatcher as gay icon. The qualifications for gay icon status have always been vague, but there are two essentials – suffering and survival – and, as Barr points out, Baroness Thatcher had both. "This blonde woman rises from the rubble again and again," he says of Lady Thatcher and the Brighton bomb. "I'd like to brush the dust from her big blonde hair - and tell her it'll be all right."
This kind of imagery will be hard to take for some, but that's part of the deliberate provocation and contrariness of the book. Barr is a journalist who lives in Brighton and swans around London but he grew up poor in the small towns of North Lanarkshire with an alcoholic mother and abusive stepfather. His thesis is that it was Lady Thatcher who inspired him to escape.
Exactly how she is supposed to have done this is not coherently explained. Part of the theory would appear to be that, despite their different backgrounds, there were similarities between author and subject and there is some evidence for this. Barr, for instance, was told by a teacher that Oxford was not for him and Charles Moore's recent biography revealed that Lady Thatcher was told the same thing.
Barr also tells us Lady Thatcher was a kind of beacon for him, a light he was drawn to, inspiring him to get away from an upbringing where violence and homophobia were common. He says she told us all to get educated and get away, and he listened. "You made it OK for me to run away and never look back," he says. "You threw me an escape ladder. My other mother."
That's an arresting description of a woman many Scots hated but what Barr fails to do (and this is where the book's lack of depth is exposed) is square this with how Thatcherism affected his community. He shows us evidence of the industrial change some blame on Thatcherism – the closure of Ravenscraig and the cement works near his home – but doesn't say how this fits into his theory. He may believe Lady Thatcher was not to blame for those changes, or he may accept she was but love her anyway – both are perfectly legitimate positions. The point is that he remains silent, which leaves Maggie And Me as a book full of holes; a book with a beginning and an end but no real explanation of how we got from one to the other.
Maggie And Me
Damian Barr, Bloomsbury, £14.99
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