Mantel vows to end trilogy in style
LONDON – Hilary Mantel, who on Tuesday night became the first woman and first Briton to win the coveted Man Booker Prize for fiction twice, vowed on Wednesday to bring her epic trilogy set in the court of King Henry VIII to a satisfactory close.
Her comments could have the bookmakers offering odds on the 60-year-old making it an unprecedented three Booker wins when the final instalment, provisionally titled The Mirror and the Light hits the shelves, probably in 2015.
For now, the focus is on Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume of her sweeping historical fiction charting the meteoric rise and equally dramatic fall from grace of blacksmith’s-son-turned-king’s-chief-minister Thomas Cromwell.
Asked how The Mirror and the Light might differ from her two previous Tudor histories, Mantel told BBC’s Today program: “It’s going to be a complex book, I guess in texture more like Wolf Hall than like Bring Up the Bodies.
“I have four years to cover here and what I want to do is hold up a mirror to everything that has gone before and also shed new light on it.
“What I’m trying to do is make three books that stand up independently and yet the third volume will have to contain them all … It will be complicated, but I’m not intimidated. I think I can bring it home in style.”
Mantel won the $80,000 prize at a glitzy dinner in London’s medieval Guildhall banquet hall and can expect to see sales of Bring Up the Bodies surge. Asked what she thought about the state of fiction generally, Mantel took a veiled swipe at two other female authors who have dominated the bestseller lists in recent years. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series made her the first author billionaire, helped by a recordbreaking film franchise, while E.L. James has sold tens of millions of copies of the erotic 50 Shades series.
“There will always be some kind of genre fiction, whether it’s whips and chains or boy wizards, making its way to the top, but what is important is there’s a healthy appetite for what people off-puttingly call ‘serious fiction.’”