Hilary Mantel lives in a lunatic asylum. Admittedly it hasn’t been a lunatic asylum for a while — the site was converted into flats 20 years ago, and Mantel and her husband are up on the top floor in a scrupulously ordered apartment with views over the treetops of Woking.
Nonetheless, there’s something apt about her choice of home. It’s not that Mantel herself comes over as remotely mad. With her china-blue eyes and her chalk-white skin, she looks like a figure from a Dutch painting, and exudes a similarly contained, watchful air. But just as some of the building’s grim history seems to seep up from below, so darkness is never far below the surface of her fiction.
In Wolf Hall, her huge (651-page) account of the life of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, the elaborate formality of Henry’s court cloaks endless serpentine scheming. Plotters whisper in candlelit corridors, women compete to hurl themselves into Henry’s lap, while all the time relations with Rome slip ever deeper into the mire. The book is the favourite to win this year’s Booker Prize — William Hill currently has it at 2:1
Mantel, now 57, had been toying with writing about Thomas Cromwell ever since she was in her twenties. But always something — nerves, ill health, other projects — held her back. When she did finally start, the book took her four years to write. By the time she finished, she says, ‘I was completely in tatters. I remember the day I finished it, I felt so cold I was shivering. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to anything I’ve written before.’
She’d first come across Cromwell as a Roman Catholic schoolgirl in rural Derbyshire. In her textbooks, Cromwell was invariably portrayed as a humourless, amoral chancer — a black-blooded Mr Nasty to Sir Thomas More’s saintly Mr Nice. Mantel, however, had other ideas.
‘When someone is so systematically vilified, you get curious as to how it started. And if you’re brought up with someone in a stained-glass window, as I was with Thomas More, you find yourself wondering if perhaps he had feet of clay. By the time I was an adolescent, I’d developed a policy of believing the opposite of whatever I’d been taught. And when I started the book, I instinctively leaned more towards Cromwell than More.’
Mantel’s Cromwell is not without unscrupulousness, but he’s also affable, sensitive and wry. More, on the other hand, is a vain, sanctimonious, ravenously keen heretic-hunter. ‘I don’t think my portrait of More is wholly unsympathetic, but it’s amusing that people are shocked by it. What people tend to forget is the people whose businesses More ruined and who he locked up until their health was broken.’
As she pours tea, I notice that one of the books on Mantel’s living-room desk is the Readers’ Digest Complete Wordfinder. Somehow this doesn’t seem apt at all: Mantel is the most supple, distinctive and richly imaginative of novelists, and in Wolf Hall she set out to do something that was as ambitious as it was daring: to breathe new life into the historical novel.
‘One of the things that always strikes me about historical novels is that the characterisation is rarely as satisfactory as it is in a modern novel; the people aren’t as layered and real. I wanted this to be the exception, and I wanted to try to reconstruct Thomas Cromwell’s memories for him, so that you got the texture of a lived life — not just something that was flat on the page.’
Where possible, she stuck to verifiable fact, but she did allow herself a few speculative flourishes — for instance, she has Cromwell nursing romantic feelings for Henry’s future bride, Jane Seymour. ‘I have to hold my hand up and say I completely invented that, although it’s not inconceivable as Jane’s sister Lizzie did marry Cromwell’s son.’
And what about her assertion that Henry went back to sleeping with Anne Boleyn’s older sister, Mary, when Anne was pregnant? ‘I think there’s a very good chance it happened. It would have been a typical Henry manoeuvre. He was not the womaniser people took him to be, I think. He had no particular yearning for variety; he was more comfortable with the familiar.’
Until she was four years old — an age when she confidently assumed she would turn into a boy — Mantel says that she was completely untroubled by self-doubt. ‘I was very robust and very happy and I knew that I was going to a knight of the Round Table. That was my vocation. But after that… well, everything went to pot.’
When she was 11, her father moved out, never to return, and she ended up taking her stepfather’s name, Mantel. In her twenties she suffered from endometriosis that for several years was misdiagnosed as depression. As she relates in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, she had surgery that made her unable to have children and was put on steroids that doubled her weight. She became, she wrote, ‘a sad sack enclosing a disease process’.
By the time she started Wolf Hall, Mantel had already written ten books — and also spent four years as the Spectator’s film critic. But while her work had brought her considerable acclaim — along with a CBE — she’d never felt that confident as a writer. Ill health, she feels, played its part here too.
‘I’ve had a lot of health problems over the years, a lot of really rocky times. That’s probably the main reason why I didn’t begin Wolf Hall earlier. Looking back now, I suspect I was probably right in thinking that I didn’t have the energy to carry it through before — because when you’re physically weak, it saps your mental energy and takes away your confidence. Really, it took me until my mid-fifties to start gathering my confidence again. But finally I felt the time was right. And when I did, it was as if I had to call upon my bold young self, the one who wasn’t fazed by anything. It really did feel like putting on a suit of armour and getting on my warhorse.’
Then, when Mantel was roughly two thirds of the way through the book, she was struck by a very large, very daunting thought. ‘I began to see that this was going to be two novels, not one. It had developed its own current and it was pulling me more and more towards telling the Thomas More story. I was going to need another book entirely to tell the fall of Anne Boleyn. That was a bit of a shock, both for me and for my publisher, but they took it in good part.’
Immersed in the minutiae of 16th-century life, blinking in surprise at the end of each day when she found herself in 21st-century Woking, Mantel came to realise something else. ‘I saw that historical fiction is what I’m most comfortable with. I like facts, I like evidence and I think it plays to my strengths as a writer. So there was a sense of this is what I should be doing. It’s taken a long time, but now I really do have this feeling of finally coming home.’
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