Hilary Mantel is the clear bookies' favourite to win the 2009 Booker prize
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Eamonn McCabe
Author Hilary Mantel has resisted shallow interpretations of her macabre work as domestic novels. Now her latest pitch-dark novel is the favourite to win the Booker prize
Aida Edemariam
Saturday 12 September 2009
T
here is an anecdote Hilary Mantel tells, about herself at six, and "a little girl in my class putting her hand up and saying, 'Miss! My mother says there's no such person as the devil.' And I remember thinking through all sides of the question. I thought: her mother's told her that because she's having nightmares. And Miss doesn't know what to say! Because how can she say, 'Your mother was wrong'? It was the most delicious moment."
Her large pale eyes look intent, and mischievous. "But of course, I did myself believe in the devil. I just thought I was made of stronger stuff than that little girl."
She tells it because she is trying to illustrate how her writing mind works, the ambivalences, the watching and weighing – but it also says much about her: about her Catholic upbringing, her tar-black sense of humour, her role, always, as the marginal watcher, the defiance and will to survive that she has imparted to her most recent character.
Wolf Hall, which has been shortlisted for the Booker prize, follows Henry VIII's machinations from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, son of an alehouse-keeper and blacksmith, lawyer-turned first Earl of Essex and architect of the split from Rome. Even though she is running in a very strong field (JM Coetzee, AS Byatt, Sarah Waters, Adam Foulds and Simon Mawer) the bookies make her the clear favourite: according to Ladbrokes, Wolf Hall is apparently most popular novel in Booker betting history.
Her husband brings in a tray – cups, teapot, a plate of delicate biscuits. Their large flat, on the top floor of a converted asylum ("the neighbours report oddities," she once wrote. "One has seen a disembodied arm floating around") is flooded with sunshine, and we sit in chairs overlooking miles of woodland; the city of Guildford is, apparently, hidden in one of the dips. Her books, 10 novels and a memoir, are full of dark shadows, frightening corners, but here it's all pale: cream carpets, cream chairs, peach or pale green walls; Mantel herself wears a long sky-blue dress, covered in flowers. Her eyes, with their thin outer rim of darker blue, miss nothing; her voice, with its northern consonants, is slightly breathy, slightly hoarse, both girlish and very much not at the same time: it carries a great freight of complicated wryness; wields flippancy, as she once put it, like a weapon. She is generally still, except for her hands, which are actorly, almost melodramatic. Illness has encased her in unwanted weight, but somehow the impression is of angles everywhere.
Wolf Hall is supple, vivid, and warm; particularly striking is the natural way it absorbs now-alien levels of casual brutality and understands, implicitly, how real a force religion was in daily life, how close were death and eternal damnation. It's true that she has form: "Many of my novels," she has said, "whatever their theme, have a supernatural tinge. Paranoia is their climate, the macabre is always lurking. If there is no actual ghost, there are powerful fears of the unknown. There are houses with no-go areas, an 'empty' flat from which footsteps are heard; or there is a psychic no-go area, a long-buried secret, a Bluebeard's room." But 1527, with England on the cusp of rejecting Rome, seems particularly suited to her.
"If you were brought up in a religious setting, like Catholicism," she says – her parents were Irish Catholics who had fetched up near Glossop, in Derbyshire – "you believe in magic, but you were also told there was something more powerful than magic, and that is the invisible world created by God. And the fact is that the visible world is only the tip. I still believe that. I have a very strong sense of the world of our senses being – how can I put it – not the whole story."
By the time she was 12 she had rejected religion, but it had already left another indelible mark, the "real cliche, the sense of guilt. You grow up believing that you're wrong and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough. It's like installing a policeman, and one moreover who keeps changing the law."
It did not help that by the time she was four, in 1956, her parents' marriage was in trouble; a lodger had moved into their ghost-riddled house and gradually supplanted her father, who would sit in the front room with his chess board while his wife and her new partner occupied the kitchen; after a few years of this they moved, and the children were given their stepfather's name. Mantel never saw her father again, though after her memoir Giving Up the Ghost was published in 2003 a stepsister she had never heard of wrote and told her of his remarriage, and death. Also that he once saw her on television, in "1990, the Booker Prize dinner; the year of AS Byatt's Possession. And what did he say? He said, 'I think that's my daughter.'"
A spiky girl, ill-suited to childhood, she was the first in her family to get into grammar school ("Passed. So I can have a life, I thought"), where she did well, and then the first into higher education, reading law at the London School of Economics. Her mother could perhaps have done something similar, but a clerical error meant she was never entered for her 11-plus. "My mother's never sat an exam in her life, so she has no appreciation of what that was like, but she did her very best to make sure I got what she had missed, even though she wasn't perfectly sure what that was." Mantel wanted to be a barrister, and impressed her teachers, but "the facts of life pressed in on me. I was female, northern and poor." She was also in love, and after her first year she moved to the law department at Sheffield, where her boyfriend was studying geology; they married when they were 20.
She had always been rather sickly, racked by fevers, migraines interfering with her hearing and vision; her stepfather, impatient, had nicknamed her Miss Neverwell, but the year after she left university her afflictions suddenly became debilitating. Pain, she writes, "sliced through me … It stole my life." She went to doctors, but prejudice coloured their diagnoses. "It was assumed[the symptoms] were psychosomatic, and that you were under some sort of strain owing to the fact that you were trying to operate in a man's world. This is what I was told: I was told my symptoms were caused by ambition."
She is appalled by those who have forgotten what her generation, and her mother's generation, encountered. "very annoyingly, you get women nowadays who are educated and have got on in their professions, saying, 'Oh, but I'm not a feminist.'" Anger suffuses her face, an intensity almost indecent. "The only reason they can say that is that they're standing on the shoulders of their mothers, who fought these battles, I think for a woman to say 'I'm not a feminist' is [like] a lamb joining the slaughterer's guild. It's just empty-headed and stupid."
Perhaps they're trying to distance themselves from a particular caricature of feminism?
"Yeah. Well, they need to inform themselves. Women now take a great deal for granted, but of course the fact is that only a part of the feminist agenda has ever been worked through."
Assumptions about women's writing coloured how her early novels were read. "My first two novels were very black comedies. The second one, Vacant Possession (1986), was a state-of-the-nation novel. It was set in 1984! It's a bit of a clue! But they were read as domestic black comedies. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), tells you a great deal about the wellsprings of [Islamist] fundamentalism. But it was read as a domestic story.
"When A Place of Greater Safety (1992), came out, one critic said (suddenly she sounds like Alan Bennett, or Eeyore), 'There's a lot in it about wallpaper.' There's one reference to wallpaper. A new wife says to her husband, shall we have treillage? And he says, 'Ask me a real question'. And that's the reference to wallpaper. I think it's the fact that if a man wrote a book about a family, it was understood to have wider repercussions, to be a metaphorical representation, perhaps of the political process. If a woman wrote the same text, it would just be … a domestic novel."
How did that make you feel? A pause. "It amuses me." She could not sound less amused. "And it saddens me, as well." Though she does think the world has changed, and "actually, with Wolf Hall, I think I've passed that barrier … but you'd have to ask me in a few years."
And assumptions about women nearly killed her. She was prescribed antidepressants, and when they didn't work, sent to a psychiatrist, who prescribed Valium ("it worked to damage me"), Fentazine, which gave her akathisia, "the worst single, defined episode of my entire life," as she wrote in her memoir. "No physical pain has ever matched that morning's uprush of killing fear, the hammering heart. You are impelled to move, to pace in a small room. You force yourself down into a chair, only to rise out of it. You choke; pressure rises inside your skull. You hands pull at your clothing and tear at your arms …" The answer was Largactil, a heavy-duty anti-psychotic, "which knocked me into insensibility."
If they didn't listen much at first, they listened less now. "Once you're labelled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness. So you are trapped in a cycle of invalidation. Obviously this still happens to people, and it happens to men, I'm sure. ... But it's very dangerous, when what the person actually has is a physical illness, for which no investigation has been undertaken."
By this point she was working as a social worker in a geriatric hospital, "and it seemed as if the avenues were blocked". So she read, biographies and histories of the French Revolution, making notes she would take with her when her husband, Gerald, got a job at the geological survey in Botswana. "I just went on and on researching, until I came to the point where the facts had run out and I realised I must make things up. And so I began inventing in a very wary sort of way." (The Booker traditionally needs some sort of controversy to keep it afloat; so far this has been provided by AS Byatt attacking the use of real people in fiction, and thus, it was felt, her rival Mantel. "I don't for a moment think … [her] remarks were directed at me or Wolf Hall," says Mantel. "Indeed I have been told that she is upset at the thought they might be interpreted in that way.")
Pain spread and deepened, and she searched, desperately, through medical textbooks to find out what was wrong, eventually diagnosing herself with endometriosis, in which cells normally found in the lining of the womb crop up elsewhere in the body. Returning to England on leave, she went to have it treated and at St George's Hospital, then on Hyde Park, "my fertility [was] confiscated, and my insides rearranged." Her novel was rejected, and, when she and Gerald returned to Botswana, their marriage fell apart.
She had been told endometriosis did not recur; she was proof that it did: three years after her operation she was overwhelmed by resurgent pain. This time hormones were prescribed. She had been seven and a half stone, "thin and pale, with long legs and a long fall of colourless hair"; within a year she was size 14. Her husband came back from Botswana, and they remarried. She followed him to a job in Saudi Arabia, where the confinement, the treatment of women, the inability to go anywhere by herself, enraged her. And she kept growing, size 20, weight exacerbated by steroids, which gave her hair-loss and "a steroid moon-face". She became strange to herself, and "accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off."
She wrote another book. "I was always driven, it's just that I looked like a person who was driven. And now I don't look like what I am." Which is differently driven, perhaps. "I run, a lot of the time, on mental energy, which is my alternative fuel. My body's always screaming for a rest, and my mind's always screaming, 'Go, go, go!' And I need – I get a lot of my impetus from the fact that I've got so much to write. I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets." Health is an ongoing struggle; every year, it seems, something new is wrong. "What you have to do is not be at war with your body. Somehow you have to accommodate your body's weaknesses, quirks, and nasty surprises. Though it's very hard not to feel as if you're chained to a saboteur."
She has wanted to write a novel about Thomas Cromwell since the 70s, but it took her years to feel she had the strength. "You know, you get these periods when the sun breaks through" – her hands and voice lift in benediction – "every few years. And you have to take advantage of them." But when she began the book, "I began to feel so strong. And I thought, 'why didn't you meet Thomas Cromwell years ago? He's so robust! You can't knock him down.' I spent all those years with Robespierre and his asthma. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be, 'Choose healthier characters'."
Wolf Hall extract 'His left eye is blinded'
"So now get up."
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full-length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father's first effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father's boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.
"So now get up!" Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. "What are you, an eel?" his parent asks. He trots backwards, gathers pace, and aims another kick.
It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. I'll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.
"Look now, look now," Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he's dancing. "Look what I've done. Burst my boot, kicking your head."