19 Aug 2012 19:57:20
Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker prize for her novel Wolf Hall, and last month longlisted again for its sequel, has fuelled the debate about the literary claims of historical fiction by arguing that characterisation in historical novels, "even very good historical novels", is "often two-dimensional".
She told the audience at the Edinburgh international book festival: "It's a big ask, to give the reader all the background information and all the foreground information and make the characters work as well." She said in her own books, "what I am trying to do is to write as I would in any other novel, so that it has a literary quality as well as, I hope, a historical quality".
She added: "I don't see why you should compromise. In writing a historical novel you use all the tricks you have learned on diverse subject matter and use all the techniques you bring to novels of contemporary life."
Mantel, making a rare public appearance in a year when fragile health has limited her engagements, was speaking about Bring Up the Bodies, the second book in her projected trilogy about the 16th-century politician Thomas Cromwell, who started as "a blacksmith's son, and rose to be Earl of Essex, Henry VIII's right-hand man, and minister of everything" – before ending up on the scaffold.
Over her career Mantel has executed numerous characters, including Marie-Antoinette and many other figures in her 1992 novel about the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety; as well as Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers in Bring Up the Bodies. "I've marched a lot of people to the scaffold, and beheading seems to be my favourite sport," she said.
Despite the inevitability of Cromwell's death, however, she said that "in every scene, even the quiet ones, I try to create turning points, multiple turning points. So the reader knows how it's going to turn out, but the reader's expectation of how and why is constantly challenged."
Her aim was to place the reader in "that time and that place, putting you into Henry's entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It's to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case moving forward into a future that is not predetermined, but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role."
To illuminate her technique she pointed to the scene, early in Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell, from a window, watches Jane Seymour walking with Henry in the garden of Wolf Hall. Cromwell does not realise it, but the king is falling in love. Cromwell regards them through "the wobble in the glass" – the uneven Tudor glazing of the window. At times he cannot see precisely what is going on; nor can he hear them. This scene, said Mantel, is a hint about the nature of the book. "People are in your sightline one minute and then they bob out of it. And then there's the wobble in the glass, and you have to change your position to try to follow them." A romantic novel, she said, would be quite different, would put you there in the garden, with Jane, and with perfect access to her feelings.
There is a Shakespearean quality to Mantel's writing: the mixture of low and high discourse, the political and historical setting, her theme of the rise and fall of great men. She revealed how all her writing, in her view, can be traced back to one single scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar – act three, scene two – in which Mark Antony speaks over the dictator's body, saying: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; /I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."
"I came to Shakespeare very early," said Mantel. "When I was about eight I found somewhere a black, grimy, ancient-looking book called Steps To Literature: Book Five. And in it there was a piece of Shakespeare, an extract from Julius Caesar … The crowd has been on the side of the conspirators and Brutus, but Antony, by a feat of rhetoric, turns them around so that they become not a crowd but a mob and they are hunting for the conspirators through Rome. And in my beautiful simplicity I thought this scene was the complete works of Shakespeare, which I had heard mentioned with reverence.
"Everything I have done is somehow wrapped into that scene. I have been concerned with revolution, with persuasion, with rhetoric, with the point where a crowd turns into a mob; in a larger sense, with the moment when one thing turns into another, whether a ghost into a solid person or a riot into a revolution. Everything, it seems to me, is in this scene."
She also spoke about the novel she is working on now, The Mirror and the Light, which will complete the trilogy and, inevitably, culminate in Cromwell's execution. It will end, she said, with a scene mirroring the opening paragraphs of Wolf Hall, in which the young Cromwell is kicked half to death, in the mud of Putney, by his brutish father.
"When the first line and the picture of the 15-year-old Thomas Cromwell came into my mind, lying on the ground in his own blood, thinking that his father is going kill him; thinking that he is going to die at any minute, and hearing the voice of his father sneering at him, 'So now get up,' my mind immediately flew to what would be the end of the project.
"My idea is that probably the voice that says 'So now get up' is in his own ear again, and with the fading of Cromwell's consciousness the project becomes extinct. It is done."
