Mantel Pieces by Hilary Mantel review – witty and ferocious
When Hilary Mantel first began to write for the London Review of Books in 1987 she warned the editor that she had “no critical training whatsoever”. “Thank goodness,” you think. What Mantel has instead are much more useful qualities: a researcher’s in-depth grasp of every topic she writes about, fearlessness, originality and robust common sense. Her wide-ranging pieces, spanning three decades, are the best kind of critical writing, rich with recondite knowledge, wearing their learning lightly.
The essays in this collection explore subjects – France’s ancien régime and the revolution, Tudor England and the court of Henry VIII, illness and the body, spiritualism and visionary experience – that the double Booker winner has made her own in her fiction and her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003). What sets Mantel’s novels apart is also what sets her critical writing apart: an unerring eye for the telling detail, the clue that will unlock what she calls “the puzzle of personal identity”.
She understands that apparently opaque actions can often be understood by stripping them back to their origins in simple human emotions. Take the notoriously forbidding Robespierre, who personally signed more than 500 arrest warrants during the Terror. Mantel points out that he suffered the loss of his mother and the desertion of his father when he was six. “His touchiness, his vulnerability, his tendency to flinch from people, suggests an active sense of shame,” she concludes. “Unhappy childhoods always leave something behind – if only death certificates.” Quite a few, in this case.
Related: Hilary Mantel: 'Being a novelist is no fun. But fun isn’t high on my list'
The author is, of course, quite brilliant on the Tudors and the various iterations of Henry VIII, from strapping young prince (“Hooray Henry”), through pious apostate (“Holy Henry”) to tyrannical Bluebeard (“Horrid Henry”). But she also argues persuasively that the ageing and increasingly irascible king fits the picture for McLeod syndrome, the symptoms of which include progressive muscular weakness in the lower body, depression, paranoia, and an erosion of personality – which would make the tragedy of his reign “not a moral but a biological tragedy, inscribed on the body”. In his later years Henry suffered from osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone of the leg. ‘Historians,’ says Mantel writes, ‘and, I’m afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect.’
Mantel, who has written frankly in the past about her misdiagnosed endometriosis, knows what she’s talking about: her essay “Meeting the Devil”, describing abdominal surgery she underwent in 2010, is one of the most irreverent and savagely convivial meditations on pain and illness you are ever likely to read (no wearing away of the intellect here). ‘No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it,’ she warns, and then goes on to write about her own in ways both new and startling, including a magnificently creepy dream encounter with the devil himself (‘He is 32, 34, that sort of age, presentable, with curly hair, and he wears a lambswool V-neck … We exchange heated words, and he raises a swarm of biting flies; I wake, clawing at my skin’). Virginia Woolf once complained about the ‘poverty of the language’ we have to describe physical illness. ‘What schoolgirl piffle’, Mantel counters. ‘The torture chamber is where people “speak”.’
And speak she does, with passion and eloquence, not just about the ills of our bodily existence, but about the one beyond. Her thoughts about suffering and female powerlessness coalesce in “Britain’s Last Witch”, an examination of the career of the medium Helen Duncan, known as “Hellish Nell” – who was convicted in 1944 under the 1735 Witchcraft Act – and what it has to tell us about the “damaging disjunction between middle-class ideals of femininity and the reality of working women’s lives”. Helen’s séances (and their aftermath) were terrifying in their violence: she extruded ectoplasm from her nipples, and then submitted to invasive physical examinations by ghost-busting “experts” in which “every orifice and crack where an instrument or hand would go was thoroughly explored”.
Mantel’s underappreciated novel Beyond Black (2005) has another wounded but potent medium as its main character. Her interest in spiritualism feels personal, and I’ve often wondered why. On finding this essay among pieces about Robespierre and the Bourbons and the Boleyns, the answer jumps out at you: like the historical novelist, the medium sets out to speak through the lips of the dead. Mantel makes Nell, who “ended sessions as if she had been in a fight, ‘dazed in the corner, blood and slime dripping from her chin’”, or Marie-Antoinette, “eaten alive by her frocks”, or Anne Boleyn, “a woman of frayed temper who lives on the end of her nerves”, walk and talk; she makes what is lost retrievable, the dry bones live.
So from the Tudors to the Windsors, and Mantel’s 2013 lecture, “Royal Bodies”, which triggered a media frenzy following her reference to Kate Middleton, then newly launched as the Duchess of Cambridge, as “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore”. Seven years on it’s still as clear as day that Mantel’s criticism was never of the fledgling duchess herself, but of our credulous fetishising of royal female bodies as a class. From her unforgettable description of Diana’s wedding dress unfolding from the bridal coach “like ectoplasm from the orifices of a medium”, to her gleeful account of how she herself stared at the Queen during an evening party at Buckingham Palace “as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones”, Mantel is in the business of undercutting that enemy of intelligence, “the faculty of awe”. Ferocious, witty and unapologetic, these essays remind us how dangerous it is to go about in the world, as she writes in “Royal Bodies”, “unfortified by irony, uninformed by history”.
• Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
