Struck by plausible grapple with evil

IMAGINE an Archibald prize-winning portrait that both packers and judges agreed on. That's about how often popular and critical opinion meet in the choice of the Booker. Hilary Mantel has done it with her historical novel Wolf Hall.

IMAGINE an Archibald prize-winning portrait that both packers and judges agreed on. That's about how often popular and critical opinion meet in the choice of the Booker. Hilary Mantel has done it with her historical novel Wolf Hall.

For Ladbroke's, it was relatively easy: an overwhelming percentage of bets placed were for the Englishwoman's eighth novel. For those who have spent years singing Mantel's praises, it has been a harder slog. Even before her breakthrough fictional recreation of the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety in 1992, reviewers were dazzled by her intelligence, antic black comedy and poised prose.

And yet wider success has been stymied by the problem of evil; Mantel's novels are drenched in it. In her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, the author recalls an encounter with the devil that took place when she was seven. It was the height of a toddler and 30cm thick and it climbed into her skin and made itself at home. The shockingly bad things that happen in every corner of Mantel's oeuvre attest to this diabolical intimacy.

Even as critics celebrated her work, they often bridled at its creepiness, as if the lineaments of our human condition could be traced without exploring the worst things of which we are capable. Although Mantel is a lapsed Catholic, she shares with earlier literary converts Muriel Spark and Graham Greene a sense of evil as a force that is palpable in the world. And that chill factor has, until now, cooled readers' ardour.

The unanimity of admiration for Wolf Hall suggests an intriguing possibility: that Mantel has discovered in Henry VIII's chief minister - the clever, dangerous and unsmiling Thomas Cromwell - a historical figure complex enough to embody these dark forces.

As Peter Rose explained in The Australian review of Wolf Hall earlier this year: "Few novelists really understand power ... but Mantel knows its terrors and perils. Great novelists make evil plausible and enthralling. Mantel succeeds in humanising tyrants and psychopaths whom we thought we knew thoroughly."

That Mantel's novel was able to best a field containing such giants as A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee is no surprise to those who have watched her in the past. That she should produce a 650-page novel about a shadowy Tudor politician that compels the attention of thousands of ordinary readers is cause for a feeling closer to awe.