Tag: Kamila Shamsi

Hilary Mantel (2) – LRB et. al.

Hilary Mantel was for many years a contributing editor of the London Review of Books and for this weekend (only, one should say, and it is now almost gone) her many essays, reviews, stories, etc. are freely available. For those without a subscription, a collection of her work in the LRB titled Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published in 2020 – and mentioned by me here.

A statement from her publisher is here. And from her friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, at The Huntington Library here.

Many sincere tributes written for The Guardian can be accessed here. The New York Times (subscription mostly required) obituary is here, also “What to Read by (and About) Hilary Mantel” . And today, an opinion piece from Kamila Shamsie in which she relates an anecdote of a meeting with Mantel at a dinner party (they share agents) not long before the publication of Wolf Hall; encapsulating some of my own thoughts on the extraordinary narrative voice that Mantel created:

[…] It was as though she’d been present and was relating, full of delight, a piece of slightly scurrilous gossip that she overheard while pouring wine, unseen, into Wolsey’s cup.

I told Hilary someone needed to record an audio guide to Tudor London, narrated by her, that visitors could listen to while walking past locations of significance. It was a mark of her graciousness that she looked amused though I’d reduced her to the role of tour guide instead of recognizing that she had a different way of entering King Henry VIII’s England than anyone else who’d ever written about it. When I started to read “Wolf Hall” a few months later I recognized instantly the narrative voice though I had never before seen it on the page: It peers over Cromwell’s shoulder, unseen, before entering his mind.

Kamila Shamsie “Hilary Mantel Was the Magician and the Spell” in The New York Times Sept. 24 2022.

Shamsie goes on to say: ” […Hilary Mantel] embodies both the magician and the spell, and part of the particular wonder of reading her is the knowledge that no one else has ever written like that before nor will again. She seemed to see so clearly the things — the past, the spirit world, the intricate relationship between the self and power — the rest of us saw through gauze or not at all”. I love that: ‘both the magician and the spell’! Interestingly, Shamsie says that upon hearing of Mantel’s death she returned to the memoir piece “Someone to Disturb”, read by me just a short time ago as “Sorry to Disturb”, marveling again at the strange disquiet, inconsistencies – internal and external to herself – that Mantel could identify and render so wonderfully in her writing.

Again, I say: A great, great loss.

Wednesday 28th September 2022: A tribute from Hilary Mantel’s friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, from The Huntington Library in California where Mantel’s papers are being collected.

Saturday 1st October 2022: Just how great a loss can be most realized only in reading Mantel’s work but she was unafraid to enter the public fray, and the depth of her intellect and humanity is apparent in her wonderful Reith Lectures series for the BBC in 2017 – available here.

Home fires burning

My paperback edition ( Bloomsbury Publishers, 2018)

Wanting to make clear that I do read beyond the precious canon of sorts that I have created for myself; Kamila Shamsie’s highly acclaimed Home Fire comes to mind as a recent example. I must say I often shy at a crescendo of superlatives, so whilst I do agree this is a terrific read I don’t necessarily consider it an extraordinary literary highlight as some would have it – just a really good contemporary novel (finding its way onto the BBC list of “Novels That Shaped Our World”) with a lot more depth than most; exploring the themes of belonging (or not) to nation, family, religion, and what is to be done with the divided loyalties that may almost certainly arise in our globalised world amongst the many of us moving on from the place of our birth. And courageous it is, especially as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman, to write a novel in which the jihadi, ISIS, and so-called “home-grown terrorism” are central themes. And the latter leads one to consider all the connotations to be imagined in the title; “home” is just one of those words I guess – where the heart is, where fires are kept burning, that has an Office and a Secretary. And who has the right to claim a place as home, and who has the right to take it away. And how many homes can any one person have. A concept I would suggest that may very well have lost its place in our contemporary world – too tainted by a multitude of identity crises gone haywire.

Spoken in the varying participant voices, the narrative is well paced and succinct. A British Muslim family is drawn, through circumstance or design, into the cesspool of Islamic fanaticism, and must navigate the conflicting loyalties of family and state, tradition and reason. So confronted, the sisters, Isma and Aneeka, react differently in their attempts to extricate their brother, Parvaiz, from his dangerous predicament – Isma, the senior member of this fractured family, places hope in the machinations of the state, and Aneeka, the younger and Parvaiz’s twin, distrusting of government and its institutions, and its prejudices, either real or perceived, seeks to intervene directly. Neither woman will save Parvaiz, but his death is only the prologue – for Aneeka, if she can not save her brother’s life, is determined to save his death.

Bringing home Parvaiz’s body becomes for Aneeka more than just a religious ritualistic gesture, but an act of defiance against the State that deprived her brother of his statehood and right of burial. The personification of that despised entity is satisfied by Karamat Lone, who has seemingly conquered all the societal and institutional hurdles placed before him and risen to the political heights as new Home Secretary; at the expense of being ostracised from the Muslim community. The relationship Aneeka forms with Lone’s son, Eamon, in the first instance as a means to secure Parvaiz safe return, is ultimately the fatal link between two families, two traditions on collision course.

Antigone in front of the dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras 1865

We know – from author, blurb, review – that this is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and a reading of the tragedy, or even a summary of, confirms that. Shamsie is not alone in turning to the classics as a narrative device, but her elegant fitting of a very contemporary story within the frame of an ancient drama works I think very well. Striking are the parallels between Antigone’s and Aneeka’s respective acts of civil disobedience and the accepted consequences. One may wonder that, two and half thousand odd years after Sophocles, the repatriation of the dead to their nearest and dearest remains a matter of contention – and a tool of statecraft.