6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022
It has just been announced that Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s truly finest novelists, died yesterday. She has rarely been well – suffering most of her life from chronic endometriosis – but it comes as a shock just the same. And in my humble opinion a monumental loss to contemporary literature.
Only a few months ago I wrote about Hilary Mantel, and before that, and before that, on a number of occasions. Only last week did she come to mind as, swept away somewhat by the furor following the Queen’s death, I suddenly had the urge to steep myself in Royal dynasties, history, tradition, and my bookshelf could only offer up Antonia Fraser and Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.
That latter became – and remains – my all time favorite work of historical fiction. I was immediately drawn into the space that Mantel created, the historical stringency she adhered to up until the point she didn’t and the imagination took over, enthralled by the unusual narrative voice adopted – so present in every sense and tense, so powerful, so intimate, and so very modern – and by the splendidly drawn characters, intricate plot construction and the vividly realized descriptive passages. All put to page with majestic elegance.
I don’t know what Mantel was currently working on, or planned to work on next. I do distinctly recall reading that, totally unforgiving of the Brexit fiasco, she and her husband planned to move to Ireland; also that she wrote the theatrical ending to Wolf Hall for the RSC but that it arrived amidst the confusion and uncertainty of Covid restrictions at the end of last year – and suffered accordingly. At that time she stated that she had belatedly come to the conclusion that the theater was her true medium of expression. I can believe that; for my reading of Mantel’s Th. Cromwell saga quite often had the effect of transporting me up there amongst the players on medieval floor boards and into the midst of a profoundly human drama with all its essential elements of love and jealousy, power and denial, that just happened to be a Tudor drama. And at other times I felt myself transformed into an invisible body – mingling there at Court or at Austin Friars, immersed in the constant human struggle of the day to just see in the next dawn. Such was Hilary Mantel’s gift as a story teller: to make certainty and doubt, closeness and distance, reality and imagination all somehow complementary and making clear in the present the blurred reflections of a shared past.
Surely many admiring tributes will be written about the great Hilary Mantel in the next days. For my part; I’m just feeling very sad indeed.