Book Reviews, UK Press Features

A profile of Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel has never won a literary prize, though her darkly fascinating novels, both historical and contemporary, have won wide admiration since she was first published in 1985. That pattern seems to be about to change. Mantel’s latest offering, Wolf Hall, a retelling of the life of Henry VIII’s hated chief minister Thomas Cromwell, has earned ecstatic reviews and become the bookies’ favourite for this year’s Man Booker prize, with the odds slashed from 12-1 to 2-1 within days of betting opening. William Hill says it has “never seen a betting pattern like it.”

Although she has written two novels set in the 18th century, Mantel, who has grumbled about being responded to as a woman writer, is wary of being called a historical novelist. She prefers to describe Wolf Hall, like its predecessors (A Place of Greater Safety is an epic novel about the creators of the French Revolution; The Giant, O’Brien is the story of freaks and Irishmen being hunted down by a Scottish naturalist in Georgian London) as a “contemporary novel about past events.”

“I think historical novels are just as diverse as contemporary novels, and their writers don’t necessarily have anything in common,” she says. “Being labelled a historical novel can be a kiss of death.”

Writing about people who are no longer alive doesn’t, she believes, mean writing about situations that are no longer alive. When Mantel talks about the process of hearing their voices, it sounds uncannily like a haunting.

“I think, you see, the situations aren’t dead and finished – to me, history is very much alive. The dead are inside us – in our genes. Their past has shaped our present. I like the challenge of trying to get close to a person who is, as it were, always in the next room. You can hear them moving around in there, you can sometimes catch a reflection of them in a mirror, but you can’t talk to them or see them face to face.”

“What the dead do, they change you. You begin by identifying some little part of you that’s like them, so you can split it off and work with it. But by the end of a book, you’re different; the intense contact with another personality has reshaped you. I have never felt that about a purely fictional construct.”

Ghosts, and the wisps and shivers of the otherworldly, play a big part in Mantel’s interior world generally. Her novel Beyond Black is the story of a middle-aged psychic, plying her trade round the scruffy wastelands of the M25, telling clients what their dead relatives think of their new kitchen units, and haunted by “real” ghosts from her own violent childhood. These literal hauntings shade off into something only a little more nebulous in many of her other books, where characters are often gripped by memories and might-have-beens that exert at terrible pull over them, strong enough to change their behaviour. Mantel herself has felt haunted, she says, in all these ways.

“When I was six my family went to live in a house we considered haunted. I was frightened when I first came to believe in the ghosts, but much more frightened – helplessly so – when I realised the adults believed in them too. In those days my belief was literal. I thought I would open a door and see something horrible, something half-formed and degraded. Later, my perception of ghosts became metaphorical. I think of ghosts as chances missed, roads not taken. And babies not born, of course. We have chambers in the heart for all these.”

Born in 1952 into a family of Irish Catholic descent – her father a clerk, her mother working at the nearby mill from the age of 12, home first a Derbyshire village close to Glossop, then, after her mother replaced her father with the lodger, a small town in Cheshire – Mantel only started writing in her twenties, after university at the London School of Economics and Sheffield, and marriage to fellow-student Gerald, a geologist, and the first of a series of postings around the world with him. It was pain and, she says, frustration, that drove her to it – the years from 19 onwards when doctors insisted on treating her mysterious aches and persistent lethargy as mental rather than physical symptoms, until, after she’d recognized what she was suffering from as endometriosis, she was finally treated, as she put it in her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, by “having my fertility confiscated and my insides rearranged.”

“I felt my future was slipping away. I wanted to make a mark on the world. And I also wanted to read a good novel about the French Revolution, one that didn’t seem to exist, and wouldn’t unless I wrote it myself. I began A Place of Greater Safety when I was 22, and finished it when I was 27. Then I couldn’t sell it. I had to go away, rethink, and write a contemporary novel before I could get the break-through into print.”

Her official debut was a return to the story about the changeling. Every Day is Mother’s Day, published in 1985, was about an agoraphobic clairvoyant, her daughter and their social worker. It was followed by a sequel, Vacant Possession, and a novel about the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. “A Place of Greater Safety was finally published as my 5th novel, in a slightly revised form; I wrote a final draft at great speed during the course of one summer.”

The creepy shadows in Mantel’s work have led to her being described as being, like Graham Green, a person who has seen darkness and could be said to believe in original sin. Her Catholic upbringing made, she said, an interesting background for a writer, “because when you are a very small child you are introduced to the invisible world of angels and saints, whom you are told are all around you, and to the concepts of time and eternity. You can’t grasp these intellectually – you’re not ready – so you grasp them emotionally. You understand that the world is not simply what it is. Appearances deceive. This is a good thing for a writer to know.”

“I decided when I was 12 not to be a Roman Catholic anymore. I might look and talk like a Catholic; but the outward form of a thing, I told myself, is not always the same as its inner nature. For a long time I thought of myself as agnostic. Now I think I am moving back towards faith. I am trying to understand the concept of grace. But I can’t imagine ever going back to the Catholic Church. I bear too much ill will. I grew up believing that I was a bad, undeserving person, and developed an intense habit of self-scrutiny, which allowed me no peace. You can cease to practice the religion, but it’s hard to change those habits of mind.”

It is no bad thing for a writer to feel an outsider, anyway, Mantel believes, because a writer’s position is “necessarily peripheral. If you don’t start off as an outsider, you make yourself one. The onlooker sees most of the game.”

It has therefore always felt natural to take the perspective of the weak, the underdogs, people forgotten or misrepresented by history’s mainstream narrative. Giving these people back a voice feels a kind of retrospective justice.

This is why it comes as something of a surprise that she has now chosen the big soap-opera moment in English history to write about, the subject every TV producer and Sunday-supplement writer is interested in – England’s move to Protestantism, and the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn.

“It’s true I’ve always sided with the marginalised, the voiceless, the misrepresented or simply the unpopular. I admire courage, and it is most clearly manifest in these people. In a larger sense, as a northerner from an Irish Catholic background, I was always conscious there was a dream England I had never seen – a place where they had thatched cottages and hollyhocks, and people went to evensong. Englishness seemed to me to be something owed by male protestant southerners. I didn’t feel English history was my history. Then, with Wolf Hall, I marched in and planted a flag on that territory – made a grab at one of the stories central to the English myth, the story of the Reformation.”

“It was Cromwell himself who fascinated me,” she adds, quoting David Starkey, who has likened Cromwell to “Alastair Campbell with an axe”. “I wouldn’t have written about the era for the sake of it – the character came first. But it is important to me that to himself, Cromwell is not a ‘character’ – he is a person half-way through his life and on an uncertain trajectory, with memories that don’t fit together, with all sorts of unfinished business trailing, a man who is living as we all do with messiness and conditionality and imperfect information.  He is self-aware, but perhaps has his areas of blindness. He knows he scares people, but he’s not quite sure why.”

Mantel believes that Cromwell couldn’t be fully realized except through fiction. All the facts and public events that have been recorded about him ”don’t add up to a human being”; in fiction, “the novelist can go on working beyond the point where the historian has to stop”.

By the end of this book, she says, she does not necessarily want her reader to like Cromwell – too much empathy can betray the novelist – but rather to ”to stand in his shoes and look through his eyes”.

There will be a sequel (though she hopes the books will each stand alone). “What I hope to do, in the next book, is to open the prospect that he’s been holding out on the reader – by the end of Wolf Hall we think we know him, but do we?”

In Wolf Hall, Mantel reworks familiar facts and characters, showing some in a disconcerting new light – in particular, her Thomas More, Cromwell’s adversary and the champion of the Catholicism England was about to discard. The More of this novel is (historically plausibly) very unsaintly – sneering and clever-clever, a man who makes a point of humiliating his wife, a relentless self-publicist.

Her Cromwell is a recognizably Mantel construct – haunted by the memory of his dead wife, and by his violent childhood, and propelled by those memories and his own raw intelligence to strive upwards: the underdog made good. Born the bashed-about son of a drunk blacksmith in Putney, he becomes Henry VIII’s right-hand-man and the first Earl of Essex.

The question driving the book, she says, is “how did he do it?”

The subtlety of her answer comes from her own style. “A historical novelist offers a framing of reality. That doesn’t wipe out evidence and doesn’t preclude other framings. What I do is propose a version, and my guarantee to the reader is that it could be true. I try to make sure that I exclude impossibilities. I won’t rearrange history to suit the dramatic process. There’s tension between the two. Once you abdicate from the line of fact you get yourself into all sorts of trouble.”

“When working with a dead person like Thomas Cromwell, you become expert in directions: the half-seen, the half-expressed,” Mantel says. She builds her struggle between the two Thomases, Catholic and Protestant, on the merest sliver of a half-fact. When well-off young Thomas More was a teenage page at Lambeth Palace, early in the book, hungry, struggling Thomas Cromwell had an uncle who worked in the kitchens there. “What do you do if you’re a small boy from a chaotic home? Your first consideration is getting fed, so you run down to Uncle John for scraps. Two of history’s great players at the same time and the same place – could they have met? My answer as a historical novelist is, of course, yes, yes.”

Mantel has Cromwell remember a boyhood meeting with the slightly older page-boy More, who’s carrying a big book under his arms. When the urchin Cromwell asks, “what’s in that book?” More’s snooty answer is, “words.”

“Thomas Cromwell always remembers that answer: ‘words’. What troubles him is the sense of possibility, and of loss – the feeling they might have had a conversation, but didn’t. Cromwell rises up to be a supreme survivor, determined to set the agenda. But all Thomas More thinks of him is, ‘drop Cromwell in a deep dungeon at night, and when you come back in the morning he’ll be sitting on a deep cushion, eating larks’ tongues, and all the jailers will owe him money’.”

“Later, when More is in the Tower, prepared to die for a form of words, Cromwell reminds him of that moment. He says: ‘That book – was it a dictionary?’ And More says, ‘I’m sorry?’ And when Cromwell unwraps the episode, More says, ‘oh, what nonsense; I didn’t know you when you were seven.’ At More’s trial, Cromwell thinks, ‘that’s too bad, I remember you and you don’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.’”

Vanora Bennett is the author of Portrait of an Unknown Woman, which features Sir Thomas More. Her latest novel, Blood Royal, was published by HarperCollins in May.

ENDS