Sex, Death, Hunger

Joanna Mathers talks with Booker-winning author Hilary Mantel about her latest 16th century epic

The end is a beginning. Sword severing neck, arms wide, tiny body stomach down in pool of blood. A French executioner and a job well done. Anne Boleyn’s head is bundled in cloth and secreted away by a veiled woman who shudders at its weight.

Having done his job, Thomas Cromwell is hungry. Executions are dirty work but necessary.

Killing a queen is new but he’s a man of appetite and there is food and wine at hand. His earthly hungers will end soon enough. But they’ll be no razor-sharp sword for this man of blood and books. Nothing so elegant.

This isn’t a spoiler, it’s historical fact. In Hilary Mantel’s trilogy Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and new release The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell is the axis around which the novels spin. And his end is gruesome.

The son of a blacksmith, born in 1485, Cromwell made his way, via France, to Italy in the company of French mercenaries. Here, around 1503, he was rescued, starving, from the streets and moved into the service of a Florentine banker, before returning to England. In his homeland, he became a top lawyer, his reputation made in the services of Cardinal Wolsey, before becoming a favourite of Henry XIII.

After a long period of writing, I do feel like I’ve been away. I don’t have the luxury of complete seclusion, sadly, so I’m never completely cut off. But when I sit at my desk to work, it is a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

Hilary Mantel

His life is heady stuff, and Mantel has woven it into a glorious epic. For fans that have waited eight long years for the final instalment of Cromwell’s life, it’s unlikely to disappoint.

The Mirror and the Light begins with Boleyn’s death, juxtaposed against Cromwell’s hunger.

It’s as visceral and jarring as the rest of the series: sex, death, hunger and intimacy played out in the backdrop of Henry XIII’S court.

Two-time Booker Prize winner (for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) Mantel has spent the past decade-and-a-half ensconced in the 16th century. An exhaustive researcher with a commitment to history fidelity, her books are full of the colour, intrigue (and horror) of life in Henry XIII’S court.

Cromwell, she felt, had been overlooked by history. His master, King Henry XIII, is the source of perennial fascination but his chief minister had been largely ignored. Having become interested in him when she was student at a Cheshire convent school, Mantel wanted history to serve him better than the brutish fixer it had cast him as.

He was, after all, the orchestrator of so much English history: the brains behind the annulment of Henry XIII’S first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the break from Rome and the King’s marriage to paramour Anne Boleyn.

Then later, the orchestrator of her execution and that of her five so-called lovers.

Given his bloody history, Cromwell’s thuggish characterisation is understandable. But in Mantel’s hands, we are given a different man.

Her Cromwell delights in the small moments of domesticity, his wife and three children (of which only his son would outlive him). A man who has grafted his way out of poverty into power. A human. A mortal.

At 9am on a winter’s morning in an apartment near London, Mantel answers the phone. Despite feeling like she has been doing the media rounds “for months”, she’s a delight with a lilting voice and eager to converse. She stays in this apartment when she needs to be close to London: the rest of the year is spent in a quaint seaside village in Devon.

She says it’s been a year since she “scrambled her way to the finish” of the book. “It was the first of many finishes,” she says.

She worked over the last chapter extensively; and thought, once she’d submitted the work, that she would be awarded a brief pause.

“But the publishing process started immediately, so I didn’t get a break.” The Mirror and the Light, at 882 pages, is the longest book in the series. It was also the longest to write, being released nearly a decade after 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies.

Given the depth of her research, the space between the final two books is unsurprising. She is meticulous, to the point of having a card catalogue detailing Cromwell’s likely location at any given time.

This research, she says, allows her to add flesh to the facts of history. Reading between the lines of letters and contemporaneous documents gives tantalising glimpses of Cromwell’s nature.

“The more you dig into the records, the more it helps you,” she says. “Cromwell has been slowly self-revealing. You find glimpses in records from other people. With this sort of research, you need to cast your net very wide and investigate people who you may not actually use in your book.” She says that the eyes of others “offer more vivid glimpses” of Cromwell.

“The more you read, the more you get a sense of who a person is. Research builds up possibility and helps you to understand the texture of your subject.” There’s a great pleasure, she says, discovering something and realising “I can use that”.

She speaks of an early revelation, the use of a first name, that opened the door on

This is the next in a new series. Judy Bailey has teamed up with Chorus, exploring the importance of connections for Kiwis of all ages and the value of connectivity in a fast-moving digital world. Photo caption: Margaret and Neville Johnson. Photo / Mark Leedom

Broadband connection enables retirement business for go-ahead couple.

It may not have been Neville Johnson’s worst nightmare — but it was a moment he would rather forget. With retirement from his teaching career looming he and his wife Margaret decided to take the plunge into the accommodation business by offering holidaymakers rooms at their Matakana property near Warkworth.

At the time (2007) aged in his 60s, the now 70-plus pensioner knew he was on a winner; Matakana is one of Auckland’s premier tourist destinations popular for wine, food, coastal walks, beaches and the nearby Tawharanui Regional Park; there was no shortage of guests.

The couple began by taking bookings by phone, which was when the problems began: “We found we were getting a few double bookings,” says Neville. “I remember one in particular I took over the phone; it went right out of my head because I didn’t write it down.”

The guest eventually turned up but you guessed it — with no record of his booking, the Johnsons had allocated the room to other guests.

“It wasn’t a great moment,” says Neville.

“I don’t recall him being overjoyed. We spent a good hour hunting for alternative accommodation for him and while it’s not something I really want to remember, it did send a strong message to us to change our system.”

Deciding to move bookings to an online system, the couple instantly eliminated much of the human-error factor: “We found being on the web enabled us to synchronise our booking calendar and remove the risk of double bookings - and if he (the double-booked guest) reads this article, please forgive us.”

Now operating through Airbnb, their business is run almost totally online.

Neville’s situation is not uncommon and is a reflection of a new generation of over 60-yearolds who have a renewed outlook on their golden years. Not content to wind down and spend all their time on the golf course or cruise ships, they are eager to keep themselves busy and embrace technology to do that.

New research by Chorus shows over 40 per cent of Kiwis are keen to start new projects in their 60s and discover the advantages of connectivity in doing so, while 54 per cent of those 60-plus are keen to get involved in their communities. Over half of those 60-plus described themselves as tech-savvy.

Both Neville and Margaret love the modern connected world. Enthusiastic users of social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, the Johnsons stay in touch with family (they have four grandchildren) and friends.

With a daughter and one of their grandchildren living near Byron Bay in Australia they regularly keep in touch using Skype and platforms like Instagram while in recent weeks they have been linked online with another daughter who is travelling in Canada.

But it was not always so. “It’s a gradual process,” says Neville. “I think you become more comfortable the more you use it. At the start, I think some have a fear of causing massive breakdowns or malfunctions if they hit the wrong button but I’ve seen people come to it late in life and succeed.”

Neville spent most of the last 30 years of his teaching career as a primary school principal — first for four years at Leigh Primary School and then 23 years at Matakana Primary School — before retiring in 2009. Margaret, who is now approaching her 70s, retired in 2013 after working for 21 years as a receptionist at a dental clinic in Warkworth.

They got the idea for their business while staying at Akaroa on Banks Peninsula in Canterbury where Neville was attending a principals’ conference: “It was beautiful accommodation and we thought ‘we would like to do this’,” says Margaret.

“We enjoy it, it’s a great way to live now we’ve retired from our day jobs,” says Neville. ”It keeps us extremely fit (the couple do the cleaning and laundry themselves), we make reasonable money and meet some amazing people.

“I remember guests who had lived in the old East Germany at the time the Berlin Wall came down, it was interesting talking to them.

“We also make friends like the couple from Oregon (in the United States) who stayed with us three years in a row and then invited us to go and stay with them. We had a wonderful holiday over there.”

Neville, who also busies himself in the community in his role as chairman of the Matakana Hall Society, says although they put in about 30 hours a week (their property includes accommodation for up to nine people) they still know how to balance their lives.

Always jumping at the chance to get out for coffee, the couple go on regular trips and Neville is keen on fishing: “I’ve got a fizz boat and about once a month I go to a spot in Kawau Bay where I catch snapper and occasionally a bronze whaler; I also play a bit of golf and usually break 100.”

Cromwell’s deep kinship with his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey.

“Before I started Wolf Hall I read a book by George Cavendish, who was a gentleman servant in Wolsey’s entourage. He was an eye witness to Wolsey’s and Cromwell’s relationship, and in the telling of his story he reproduces a conversation in which Wolsey says: ‘Thomas Cromwell said ... ’

“This was an era in which people used surnames, and this gave me a glimpse in the closeness of their relationship.” Her findings informed the work of Cromwell’s preeminent biographer Diarmaid Macculloch, whose book 2018 Thomas Cromwell has been much lauded. “He told me that Wolf Hall made him rethink the relationship between Cromwell and Wolsey,” she says.

“I think he was probably the most important figure in Cromwell’s life: he was a father figure, really,” she continues. “More important than Henry XIII.” Mantel lives far from the literary establishment. Immersed in her 16th century world, in her apartment by the sea in Devon (which, according to New York Times, seems like “a secular shrine to Tudor England, with shelves of books on Cromwell and his contemporaries and titles about medieval fashion, food and metallurgy”) you wonder if the 21st century seems surreal.

“After a long period of writing, I do feel like I’ve been away,” she says. “I don’t have the luxury of complete seclusion, sadly, so I’m never completely cut off. But when I sit at my desk to work, it is a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.” Mantel’s relative distance from the hubbub is partly due to a health condition with which she’s wrestled throughout her life. She suffered undiagnosed for years with a severe form of endometriosis, being prescribed tranquilisers and labelled mentally unwell, before a diagnosis that meant the loss of her reproductive organs and a life without the possibility of children.

Being tiny and frail, the operation brought on early menopause and left her bloated, struggling with weight.

In her 2003 memoir, Giving up the Ghost, she puzzles over whether her medical condition, and the attendant side effects of medication, have shaped her into a different form — whether biology has been as tyrannical to her as Henry XIII was to those who fell from favour.

She still suffers today, but doesn’t let it stand in the way of her arduous schedule. The pain and the terrible mental symptoms are constant companions.

In Mantel’s books, “ghosts” are everywhere. Ghosts of possibilities, ghosts of the past, children never born. After her operation left her unable to have children, she ponders in her biography: “When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawerliners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go?” I ask her about ghosts; she was apparently visited by apparitions as a child. Was she haunted by Cromwell or Boleyn while writing her magnum opus; holding their heads, trailing blood?

Hilary Mantel

She laughs.

“‘Ghosts’ was just the name I gave them when I was a child, and no, I didn’t experience visitations when I was writing the books. I do think that the dead are close by though. You can’t see the dead, but you can bring them to life with an active imagination.” Her book series may have ended but the relationship with her protagonist has not. She is working on a stage play of The Mirror and the Light with Ben Miles, the actor who played Cromwell in earlier Royal Shakespeare Company adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies.

She was on hand to inform his performance in the first two plays, the pair working so well together that she decided to bring him on board to help recraft the story for stage.

Mantel says that she very much enjoys “going back to being a beginner” and learning the skills of the stage.

“Production is far more collaborative than writing a novel and it’s refreshing to work with a team. It’s nice to get out of my room,” she laughs.

She likes the immediacy of the work played out in front of her in the rehearsal room. “If something needs fixing, you have to be there on the spot with answers.” After the stage play is complete, she says she has “a few novels partly written” but it’s too early to say if they will be completed.

She’s admitted that it’s unlikely she’ll find another Cromwell, having been so intimately acquainted with him for so long.

I ask her if she “likes” him: a question she says is off (and maybe irrelevant), given her relationship with the character.

“It’s not really about ‘liking’ him. My job has been to put him where readers can see him. In a sense, I get behind his eyes, and see the world through them.

“I’m writing what I think Cromwell felt. He was an extremely ruthless man, a clever man, personally kind and compassionate. I want me readers to ask themselves what they would do in the same situation.” Mantel, when not “doing” Cromwell, spends time acting in her capacity as a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company and being the president of a cricket team called “The Authors’ Eleven”.

“I’m a non-playing member of the team but I hope to show my face at some the matches this year.” The Authors’ Eleven compete against The Publishers Eleven and The Actors Eleven. I ask her who is top of the table. “Diplomacy decrees that I should not answer that question,” she says, wryly.

She does, however, share that Damien Lewis, who played Henry XIII in the television dramatisation of Wolf Hall is in The Actors Eleven. She loved the series.

“There will be another series, actually,” she says. “Which should be out, at the earliest, by 2022.” Mantel fans will be heartened to here there is more to come from the 67-year-old. It will be interesting to see if The Mirror and the Light is her Man Booker trifecta — it’s bound to fly off the shelves whatever the outcome.

Through her book series, Mantel has been able to achieve something both remarkable and rare — a reimagining of one of history’s villains as a man of emotion and nuance. And for this, her legacy as one of the United Kingdom’s greatest writers is assured.

You can’t see the dead, but you can bring them to life with an active imagination.

by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate, $50) See page 42 for the review of