How did I miss Hilary Mantel? I have this feeling every time I encounter a new author. I think (rather ridiculously) “How did I survive this long without having read this author?” My life up to that point feels as if something has been missing, and I have that familiar thrill of wonder that 26 letters in the alphabet can be twisted into so many creative, mind-stretching, heart-pounding shapes. A book like this makes me happy, all over again, that I learned how to read.
Last year, when Wolf Hall, Mantel’s revisionist historical fiction about Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Moore, and abou all, Thomas Cromwell, was pulished in paper back, the London Telegraph described it as “a high-wire act that manages to work as an addictive page-turner, as a rigorous dissection of a period – and man – of history, and as a stunning piece of writing as spare and muscular as it is rich and allusive.” (Anna Martin, London Telegraph, 01 March 2010)
In the interview that follows, Ms. Mantel describes years of chronic, debilitating pain from an illness that has also left her childless. She speaks of a deep, “psychic” connection with her main character, the elusive Thomas Cromwell. She sneers at the hypocrisy of critics who dismissed her previous novels as too “domestic,” yet now fawn and praise her, simply because she was awarded the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. She is definitely eccentric, which is to be expected. For when you read her, you know she’s not going to be in the normal range. “Normal” people don’t write like that! You have to be somewhere on the fringe of the forest to see what she sees. Even in the interview, her prose is beautiful. It just rolls out. On her illness:
“You can’t get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not… sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn’t submerge you.’
Ironically, in Wolf Hall this woman, whose life has been at least partially defined by her childlessness, offers one of the most beautifully apt descriptions of childbirth I have ever read:
“When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the farther bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark toward life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. Ther river is tidal, and betwen one featherstroke and the next, her tide may turn.”
Pure screaming genius. It is odd that of all the marvelous, Dickensian descriptions of English life, of all the subtle political machinations and the delicate constructions of character, this rather “domestic” passage about childbirth stays with me. There are so many more moments in this book, that I have both listened to and read, that have stopped my breath with their brilliance. I am overselling I know, but I am oversold. I don’t generally like historical fiction. I consider it an oxymoron and usually avoid it. I am not particularly interested in the bloated, self-obsessed King Henry VIII, and felt no desire to revisit his sordid life. But something about this book intrigued me, and I recommend it to anyone that loves a tale well told. And, by the way, if you love to be read to as I do, Simon Slater’s narration of this novel (available at Audible.com) is as brilliant as the writing.
