On her own terms
It took far longer than planned, is much bulkier than expected and might turn its author into the first triple Booker Prize winner. None of this matters to Hilary Mantel.
Hilary Mantel is weighing up the first hardback copy of her new book. “It’s not too bulky,” she says, as her husband, Gerald, and I peer at the vast volume in front of us. It seems extraordinary that someone who has already filled more than 1000 pages with the life of Thomas Cromwell worries about such things.
“I am constrained by the realms of possibility — what can actually be held together,” she says thoughtfully. Whether she means the plot or the technical limits of publishing I’m not entirely sure.
In both senses, The Mirror and the Light is her biggest book yet. The final instalment in the life of Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief adviser, it is one of the most eagerly anticipated publishing events of the year.
The first two in the series, Wolf Hall, published in 2009, and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), together sold more than five million copies worldwide and both won the Booker Prize. Sellout stage adaptations and a TV dramatisation followed (the latter starring Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Mark Rylance as Cromwell). Mantel was instrumental in both.
Then came a very long silence. For eight years, rumours of writer’s block and missed deadlines have swirled while fans have clamoured for the next Tudor hit. Now, at last, it is done. The final chapter in the life of Cromwell, the puppetmaster at the heart of the English Reformation, a blacksmith’s son who rose from the backstreets of Putney to sit at the king’s
right hand.
In the first book, Cromwell helped Henry see off his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, via a marriage annulment. In the second, he turns his attention to Anne Boleyn — same trick, different methods.
The third book begins where the second ended: with the beheading of Boleyn, while Cromwell’s rumbling stomach reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast. By the end it is he who has fallen from grace.
The reason this book took so long, Mantel says, sitting in her flat on the east Devon coast, waves lapping at the pebble beach outside, is that it is the conclusion of so many strands.
“You are trying to bring home every story mark, pick up every metaphor, to have every resonance from inside the first two books humming through the third. You have to carry all that resonance inside you and hope it gets on the page,” she explains in her curious childlike rasp.
“You never really leave any project behind. Things have a long tail and this [one] exceptionally so because it’s the central project of my life, I know it is. I will never do anything remotely as big again and I don’t want to,”
Cromwell’s life is better documented as he rises through the corridors of Henry VIII’s court. “The historical record around him thickens and the range of his work becomes more complex, so his trail becomes harder to follow,” Mantel says. She finished writing last March and I’m curious about how she is feeling, now that she has lost her hero. “I do care,” she says. “Not in a sentimental way, but in the sense that these characters figure in my life more vividly than many living people do.”
The truth, I suspect, is that it hasn’t really hit her yet. The release of this book is a carefully orchestrated symphony, with the publication taking place around the world concurrently.
Tudor fever is not a uniquely British phenomenon: the books have been translated into 36 languages and are particularly popular in the US.
This means she has been busy for months correcting proofs and approving translations. There will be another stage adaptation too, which she has been working on for the best part of a year. She is almost ready for the rehearsal stage of the production, with Ben Miles reprising the role of Cromwell. After that it will be time for the final television instalment.
“You never really leave any project behind. Things have a long tail and this [one] exceptionally so because it’s the central project of my life, I know it is. I will never do anything remotely as big again and I don’t want to,” she says with a chuckle.
Mantel, 67, is one of the UK’s most successful and enigmatic female novelists; an intellectual with a mischievous sense of humour; a one-time Marxist who writes about royal history; a national icon who cannot help but rock the boat.
In 2013 she was enveloped in controversy when comments she made about Kate Middleton presenting herself as a “shop-window mannequin” were, she later said, taken out of context. She was inundated with bile on social media and criticised by David Cameron, then British prime minister, as well as Ed Miliband, then leader of the opposition. She and Gerald were barricaded in their flat, with reporters on the beach outside. Her publishers sent a food parcel, she tells me with a wry smile.
The following year she did it again, this time publishing The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, a short story imagining just that, which was met with rage from certain sectors of the press. The title came to her while she was dosed up on morphine in hospital in 2010 and saw the face of the assassin. She has never showed any regret over either episode. Instead, she blinks slowly and thoughtfully while considering the chaos, rather like a mole that emerges only rarely into daylight.
A large person with a fragile air, she is sharp and shrewd, with bright blue eyes that tell you more than most people’s do. Despite this, she is otherworldly and reminds me more than anything of a study by Vermeer.
The current crisis engulfing the Windsors is “fascinating”, she agrees, though Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave has to be viewed as “an outgrowth of show business in some ways”. She won’t be drawn any further on the subject, except to say: “I think everybody wishes them well.” Mantel has in the past compared the royal family to a group of “mollycoddled pandas”.
She believes the enduring fascination with the Tudors is very much the same as the obsession with the royal family now. “It is a distillation of all the stories that fascinate us about sex and violence and power and high politics, but being played out for us by royal people.”
The level of intrusion into the lives of the modern monarchy is a direct result of their ancestors. “They set themselves up in this way when Queen Victoria decided to invent ‘the royal family’, make it a showpiece and suggest to citizens that they were worthy of emulation, which would have been a laughable idea previously,” Mantel says.
When Victoria forged a more visible constitutional monarchy to stem a growing republican movement in Britain, the result was that they “started to hold a gun to their own heads because it meant so much reality had to be concealed’’.
“They put out there a representation of themselves as almost a holy family, not just a royal family, and of course the current royal family has tried to sustain that in the teeth of all reality, all the divorces, disgraces and disasters.”
As we talk, it is hard to avoid the row of literary awards perched on top of the bookshelf above the author’s head; below them a print of the famous Holbein portrait of Cromwell. Mantel is often held up as an example of late-life success, but she started writing books in her 20s and published nine novels before she finally stepped into Cromwell’s shoes.
She was always drawn to outsiders — unusual characters and their inner lives. The most successful was Beyond Black, the story of a suburban mystic that allowed Mantel to explore a lifelong fascination with the boundaries of psychology and the supernatural. She had critical success, but nothing on the level of what was to come.
It isn’t only the ruffian from Putney who has been remodelled and re-energised in her capable hands, but historical fiction as a whole. She has elevated the genre into an art form. When you pick up one of Mantel’s books, you are not reading about Cromwell, you walk with him through the smells, tastes and terrors of Tudor England.
“He was a good pick,” she says. “I thought it was an amazing fact that Henry VIII’s reign is told and told and told — but where is Cromwell? It seemed to me that no one had bothered to try to listen to his voice, and that is such a major gap because he is so central. It’s almost as if he was so central that people couldn’t see him.”
There was sufficient ambiguity in Cromwell’s story to give her the freedom to explore him properly, and a pleasing sense that she was opening a door for the very first time. “There is a perverse attraction to writing the inner history of someone who is not introverted. You are doing a job that the character has never done,” she says.
The final book was the hardest to pull together because the action is non-stop. The king is ageing and ill, and his moods are erratic. His daughter, Mary, is refusing to turn her back on Catholic Spain and acknowledge Henry as the head of the church. His illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, dies suddenly and the king is tortured by the absence of a male heir.
Cromwell must negotiate the delicacies of the new queen’s bedchamber while keeping an eye on the aristocratic Catholic families hoping to bring about a reconciliation with Rome.
Jane Seymour does eventually give the king a son, but dies in the process. Faced with a worrying alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and England’s old adversary, France, Cromwell is left weighing up the political potential of a new royal match.
“When you look at the earlier books, you can see the movement towards crisis, and the way I’ve chosen to do it is to lead the first book up to the death of Thomas More [Henry’s lord chancellor, executed for his opposition to the Reformation] and the second up to the death of Anne Boleyn. But when you get to the third book, there is no tidy pattern because the crises come every day, really; every day he is under siege from circumstances.”
On top of all this, Mantel has given Cromwell an illegitimate child, who travels from Amsterdam to find him. It is a rare deviation from the truth. Cromwell was thought to have had an illegitimate daughter, but her name was Jane and she was born shortly after his wife’s death.
For the most part, Mantel is particular about trying to get hold of the best facts and spends a vast amount of timing “sifting” through the archives. One of the big changes since she began the series has been the digitisation of material, which means she can now access almost everything online.
“Of course, that breeds its own problem,’’ she adds, “because the more that is available, the more you can read and the more you get into a situation where you have an infinite choice of material. So what do you select?”
Despite the importance of fact, it is the human aspect of the story that resonates the most. The thing Henry wants above all else is a child, she observes, but “women’s bodies simply won’t account for themselves’’.
“They have all the power — not the formal power but the physical power, and despite all the cleverness of his ministers, only a woman can give him what he wants.”
It is a time of huge political unrest across Europe. When Henry split from the church in Rome and established himself as the head of the Church of England in order to get around the fact that the Pope wouldn’t annul his first marriage, it sent shockwaves through the continent.
What does Mantel make of the similarities between the Reformation and Britain’s current split with Europe? The comparison, she says, is “infuriating”.
“I would love to know what they think the theological dimension of Brexit is.”
The current situation is the opposite of the events of the 1530s, because Britain then was not trying to leave Europe but “to reconfigure its role within it”, Mantel argues. While Cromwell was trying to “extract us from Rome”, he was also, through Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves, trying to enter an allegiance with the German and Scandinavian states.
“It was a moment of envisioning something very different and quite the opposite of Little England separatism,” Mantel observes. It was unfortunate that the king was unable to muster enthusiasm for Anne, who was unflatteringly known as the “Flanders Mare”. In the book, he claims she has a “displeasant air” and instructs his courtiers to make sure she is properly washed.
It is a joy to listen to Mantel talk. Her sentences are perfect narrative arcs that always lead you somewhere unexpected. Never is she more impressive than when she is annoyed. Brexit, she believes, “is a shame and a disaster — and by shame I mean I am ashamed. I feel it’s like having started a war that you’ve already arranged to lose. I just think it is a national disaster”.
It is difficult to work out whether the Conservative government is “actively malign or completely clueless”, she says, sticking the knife in with some glee. Boris Johnson is “totally” untrustworthy.
“He is a politician, a successful politician. I do not expect a high moral standard from him. But what I do expect is a system that can constrain such people, or that such people should agree to work within the constraints of the system. I don’t think that it’s fine to prorogue parliament because it doesn’t suit you to have parliament scrutinising you.”
The political landscape is now “new territory”, she says slowly.
Politicians today are “gambling”, just as they were in Tudor times. The greatest gambler of all was Cromwell himself, the lawyer who ended up a knight of the realm. His humble beginnings were a big part of the appeal, Mantel says.
“Everybody understands that story of a boy from an obscure background who gains wealth and power — but at what cost? It is a universal narrative and it is lovely to be able to write something that is grounded in a specific place and time, yet anyone in the world can understand it.”
Mantel herself had modest beginnings. She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, to a family of Irish Catholic descent. Her father, Henry Thompson, was a clerk, her mother had been sent to work at a nearby mill at 12.
It was a deeply dysfunctional family home. Her mother began an affair with a man named Jack Mantel, who was gradually moved into the family home, where everyone cohabited in uneasy silence until the family relocated to Romiley, in Cheshire, without her father. She never saw him again.
She was “acutely aware” of the irregularity of their domestic arrangements. “There was a great sense of shame,” she recalls. “Within my family there were layers of secrecy. There is an age gap between me and my younger brothers, so I knew a lot of things that they didn’t know. It was a family divided within itself.”
People in the wider community knew, but she wasn’t sure quite how much.
“There is a particular strain in keeping an open secret where you don’t know what other people know,” Mantel reflects. It sounds exhausting, I tell her. “Yes, actually — you said it. When I look back at my teenage years, exhausted is what I felt.”
It is no surprise, perhaps, that it is the internal conflicts of her characters that bring Mantel’s writing to life. She became introverted and experienced a spiritual vision in the garden of the family home at the age of seven, which she wrote about in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.
Despite the oppressive atmosphere in her childhood home, she never felt able to escape. “I didn’t find it possible to walk away from my family. I couldn’t because of having younger brothers. Also, families do have secrets, but there is a fraught complex of relationships that hold you together psychically.”
She went to a local Roman Catholic school and was the first in her family to go to university; she then read law at the London School of Economics before transferring to Sheffield University.
There were a lot of people of “natural intelligence” in her family, she says, “but society was such that they didn’t get any education”. Her mother was one of them; a talented musician and artist, but the opportunities did not exist for her. Was she frustrated by that? “Yes, I think she was. Not that she talked of it openly, but she liked an area for self-assertion. I don’t think that family life was quite enough for her.”
She thinks her mother infused her with “restlessness” and a feeling that she knew she “wanted to be something, but I didn’t have any clear idea of what that could possibly be”. She loved history, but was afraid that by studying an arts subject at university, she would end up “being processed so that I would become a teacher and start teaching history to girls, so you have this endless cycle where clever girls just teach other clever girls”.
It didn’t cross her mind that she could be a writer, but she devoured books “as though I was breathing them in”, not for comfort but as preparation for a world she hadn’t yet encountered. “Novels teach you about all sorts of circumstances in the bigger world that you might encounter or states you might pass through. I don’t mean they formed a guide to conduct, but a guide to the complexities of life.”
The great paradox of Mantel’s life is that while her mind has roamed freely back in time, her body has been falling apart, tying her down. Endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the uterus begins to grow elsewhere in the body, causing bleeding and scarring, has been her lifelong adversary, an opponent so cruel that it very nearly destroyed her.
She began to feel ill when she was 11. At the time, girls did not talk about their bodies, she recalls, so for years she just thought she was unlucky. When she was about 19, the condition intensified; rather than being in pain for a few days a month, she was in pain all the time.
She married Gerald, a geologist who now manages her career, the following year and they moved to Botswana. Her physical condition got worse and she set about reading medical journals to try to work out what was wrong.
She suspected endometriosis, but had no formal diagnosis until she returned to England for surgery when she was 27. One of the doctors thought she had cancer and the surgery was supposed to be exploratory. Instead, she woke up to find her womb and ovaries had been removed.
“There is no pleasure in being right in those circumstances,” she says. She was not warned this might be an outcome and had only heard it mentioned once by a temporary GP years earlier. She and Gerald had been looking forward to “10 years of adventuring around the globe”, so had not yet discussed starting a family. Now they never would.
The consequences did not come home to her immediately. At the time, she just felt lucky to be alive. A lot has been written about Mantel’s “childless state”, but she says it has not been as much of an issue as others make it out to be. “People always want to make more of it than there is for me. But when you have a dire situation like I had, you are lucky and skilled to pluck anything out of it, rather than settling for a life of disability and regret.”
At first she believed the surgery had been a complete success, but in fact the doctors hadn’t been able to remove all the affected tissue. “There was a brief period when I felt free of it, but then it was back. The struggle lasted for years and years, really.” Now it is not the condition itself but the repeated attempts to cure it that cause her the most grief.
“Essentially, my body is full of scar tissue and you can’t keep doing surgery on it because that only puts more scar tissue there. So yes, I have some peculiar arrangements holding me together.”
It has “restricted” her life to the extent that there is not much in it other than Cromwell: “It has meant that you don’t have much else. I have always put work first.”
She writes every day, accumulating all the background material until she is ready to write the next scene. No doubt it is this immersion in the material that makes her books sing.
The details are exquisite. The velvet bed curtains of the royal chamber; the vanity of an ageing king as he commissions yet another portrait of himself for his private rooms; the courtly banter that rages when his back is turned.
Anne, we are told, used to remark that sex with Henry was “like being slobbered over by a mastiff pup”. Mantel’s descriptions of the infant Elizabeth I are particularly delightful. The future queen is “a convulsing mass of linen, red flailing fists, a maw emitting shrieks”, she tells us.
“There was real enjoyment in writing those passages because Lady Bryan did write these letters to Cromwell,” she says of the aristocrat tasked with raising Henry’s children. “You have this sense of a household revolving around a furious little being who is too small to know she is the focus of debate.”
She is fascinated by the importance of fake news, both then and now. In Tudor England, it was the length of time that news took that made its veracity doubtful. “Now it is the speed with which it arrives unprocessed that makes it unreliable.”
It is also through Cromwell that she has met her closest friends. The books are all dedicated to Mary Robertson of the Huntingdon Library in San Marino, California, who wrote a PhD on Cromwell in the 1970s. She has become a sounding board and was the first reader of the first two books. “I wanted to know: do you recognise this Cromwell?” Mantel says. And she was relieved to discover that Robertson did.
The first readers for this book were Ben Miles (the actor who plays him on stage) and his brother George, a photographer, who have become close friends. “We have both entered very deeply into Cromwell’s thought process,” she says.
The enigmatic chief minister has even entered her subconscious. Mantel begins the day by writing down her dreams in diaries — she is currently on volume 131. It is a way of “settling” her thoughts before she begins the day.
“Most of my dreams relate to being lost, and I suppose that is appropriate because that is how you are when you are in the middle of a vast project. You are essentially vagrant, you notice certain landmarks, but then they have gone again or they change into something else.”
In the dreams, she usually calls Gerald in terror. “I would like to stop having the dreams,” she says. “They are actually quite distressing sometimes.”
Her focus for the time being is on getting the stage adaptation right. After that, she wants to give more of her energy to the next television series. “This time, we will make the space to talk through every page so we know we are both seeing the same thing,” she says. After that, there are some ideas for new books beginning to form in her mind.
The big question, at least for everyone else, is the Booker. Mantel is already the first woman and the first British author to win it twice. Will this new work break all the records and win her a third?
“People have started talking about this novel as though the only reason I have written it is to try to win the Booker again,” she says with a laugh.
The truth, she says, is that it hasn’t factored at all. “All these years, the novel itself was enough to grapple with.”
What matters most is “I’ve succeeded on my own terms — and I can’t really answer that because it’s very important to me that the stage adaptation should come right”.
The reality, I suspect, is that she isn’t quite ready to let Cromwell go. Does she like him, this man who has consumed her as thoroughly as she has consumed him? “Yes, I think I do. I admire his cleverness, his energy, his sheer appetite for life,” she says. “I admire that kind of determination in the face of the worst that life can throw at you.”
Rosie Kinchen is deputy editor of The Sunday Times News Review.
The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel, will be released on March 5. Fourth Estate, 883pp, $45 HB. It will also be available as an e-book.