This is not appropriate. She was only 70. Yes, her health was fragile, butthat was no reason to reckon with her death. And yet it happened. HilaryMantel passed away. “She was still busy with so much, starting with a newnovel,” says her Dutch publisher Nelleke Geel of publisher Signatuur. “It’s abloodletting loss to literature.”
Mantel is the author of Wolf Hall. From twelve novels and two collections ofshort stories. From the inimitable ‘memoir’ give up the ghost. In it, shesummons her family, where her father is ‘put away’ when she was ten. Yearslater, that father briefly reappeared in her short story ‘Terminus’, as afigure sitting on a train opposite hers. They look at each other and then thetrains move in their own direction. When she had written the story, she heardthat her father had died in those days. With Mantel, the supernatural was agiven.
Mantel has been a phenomenon since millions of readers worldwide discoveredher with Wolf Hall , for which she was awarded the 2009 Booker Prize. Herliterary fame was perpetuated with the sequel Bring Up the Bodies (2012,The Book of Henry ), which again won her the Booker Prize. The end of thetrilogy The mirror & the light, (2020), was ‘only’ nominated for that award.In these three novels, Mantel digs out the startling history of ThomasCromwell, right-hand man to British King Henry VIII in the England ofrebellious nobility and religious strife. They are not easy novels, and Mantelis not a coquettish author. She never was, and yet her books are addictive.She describes complex political relationships with the technique of thethriller, while in passing she evokes with well-aimed observations what lifelooked and felt, both for the poor and for the upper class, and everyone wasin constant danger. The very first novel she wrote was also a historicalnovel: A Place of Greater Safety (A Safer Place), about the FrenchRevolution. A compelling book for which she has already developed herstrength: molding historical figures into people who have long been petrifiedto their dates plus some mythical anecdotes. No publisher wanted it, it wasnot published until later, in 1992.
In Mantel’s work, novel and reality flow into each other
She made her debut in 1985 with the social psychological thriller Every Dayis Mother ‘s Day. The sequel, Vacant Possession , appeared a year later.Full of precise observations, Mantel 100 carats satanically traps everycharacter in self-overestimation, self-pity, self-deception. With theexception of a young woman who has been trampled to the point of madness. Isay no more than: this is fantastic to read, while you softly shout: no, no,don’t! And then the characters do it anyway.
Reluctance to Thatcher
From those early novels, Mantel’s distaste for Margaret Thatcher’s UnitedKingdom can be heard. In 2014, her personal aversion to Thatcher’s meagermorals, her arrogance and her harshness culminated in the novella The Murderof Margaret Thatcher , which indeed revolves around an attack on Thatcher.It’s a great story, so strong that Mantel was attacked as if she had actuallythreatened Thatcher, who had been dead for a year by then. They even calledfor a police investigation. Mantel was not intimidated, on the contrary, sheenjoyed it and reiterated once again that she had considered Thatcher adisaster for the country.
Her Thatcher story was set up the way she set up her historical novels fromthe start. She starts from a historical detail (Thatcher had to go to hospitalfor a minor surgery), does thorough research and deduces from everything shecan bring up what can happen. She already developed this method for her firstnovel, about the French Revolution. “Give me one detail and I’ll tell thestory,” she said in an interview with this newspaper. She was accused of beingscientifically irresponsible. Her answer was: “I write fiction, I can takethat space.”
Also read this interview with Hilary Mantel from 2015: ‘ I prefer historicalcharacters to fictional ones’
So she determines on the basis of inventory lists that a dress was stiff withpearls and realizes: the woman who was wearing it had an enormous weight tocarry. What does that mean? She thinks that Henry VIII is sickly fat and limp,how his intended bride Anna of Cleves sees this wretched lump of flesh for thefirst time – and for a moment has no control over her face. What Henry sees.She can’t prove those glances back and forth. She can make them plausible andthen they explain much of what follows – the fiction writer helps thehistoriography.
Romance and reality flow into each other. It is this space that Mantelappropriated with her genius writing as an argument. Cromwell was a cruel man,but remember what kind of man he was, remember he had daughters. Look at thestrange portrait that Holbein painted of him, what do you see there?Conversely, the more detailed the question was in an interview, the more sheliked it. And she always knew everything, right down to why Anne Boleyn’s lapdog was named Perkoys. Perkoys is an English corruption of the French’Pourquoi?’. That dog was one of those animals with those raised ears and achronically surprised look. Hence. She said it with a smile. And imitated the
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