How the torrid Tudors saved the sanity of the genius who makes history sexier than Fifty Shades
THE novelist Hilary Mantel has broken all sorts of records. Yes, she is the first woman to win the Man Booker prize twice, and she’s probably sold more copies of her books than most Man Booker winners added together.
But another record she has broken is that she is the first winner in memory to have been a popular writer long before she won the prize.
Her historical fictions, and in particular the two winning books Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, would have sold in their hundreds of thousands even without the help of the Man Booker.
Like thousands of others, I find Mantel a compulsively readable story-teller and have lapped up her books. The latest two are what used to be called ‘middle brow’ — rattling good yarns, without intellectual pretension, set in the reign of Henry VIII.
(Incidentally, don’t be so obsessed by Henry VIII that you miss out on her brilliant earlier novel about the French Revolution, A Place Of Greater Safety, which is her masterpiece.)
At reading groups and on family holidays, people have been passing round her reconstructions of Henry’s court as eagerly as any best-seller. She quickly hooks s readers eade s with an enthusiasm for the Tudor age. It is an age into which she escapes s with relish, for these books have emerged from her own struggle. She has suffered years of pain, starting with ‘ghastly’ periods s aged 11, but doctors told her it was all in the mind and regarded d her as a psychiatric case.
She was given anti-depressants. When they made her vomit, she was referred to a psychiatrist who diagnosed the problem as stress caused by over-ambition.
Recalling that dark time, Hilary y said: ‘I was convinced I had a physical illness, but once someone has decided you are mentally y ill, everything you say tends to reinforce that. If you keep on n resisting, that goes to prove how w mad you are.’
Having been treated for years as a neurotic girl by patronising doctors, she got hold of medical books in her mid- 20s and diagnosed herself as suffering from endometriosis, a painful condition affecting the womb and other organs. ‘I was a textbook case,’ she said.
When Hilary was 27, she was admitted to hospital with abdominal pains. She underwent surgery, and when she came round from the anaesthetic, found they had removed her womb, ovaries and part of her bowel.
AS SHE put it in her haunting memoir Giving Up The Ghost: ‘ My fertility was confiscated. When women apes have their wombs removed and are returned by keepers to the community, their mates sense it and desert them . . . [before the operation] I thought I could have a baby.
‘At 27 I was an old woman, all at once. I had undergone what is called a surgical menopause or what textbooks of the time called female castration. I was a eunuch, then?’
Moreover, the operation failed to cure her problems. The removal of her ovaries at such a young age had led her to develop an underactive thyroid, so she was given steroids and swelled four stone, from size ten to size 20, in nine months.
‘I have not been able to reverse the process. I see myself as living in this alien’s body,’ she has said.
On top of all this, she had to bear an extraordinary family history. She was reared as a Catholic in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield. When she was four, a lodger moved into their small cottage and gradually supplanted her father. Mantel is not the name of her father, but of this lodger, Jack!
Not surprisingly, when she grew up, she found human relationships difficult. She married geologist Gerald McEwen and followed him round the world in his career. The marriage ended, but they came back together.
Not only is she the only woman to be awarded the Man Booker prize twice, but she married the same person — twice.
They live in a modest flat overlooking the sea at Budleigh Salterton, a Devon town of 5,000 inhabitants, most of them elderly.
She likes it that way. She can sit in a sparsely furnished home with a laptop and escape into the world of the Tudors as her devoted husband manages the business end of things, deals with accountants, sees off the Press and brings her coffee and biscuits.
She has, of course, hit a rich seam with Henry VIII. The British are obsessed by his reign — however often we are told the story, we want to hear it again, which partially explains the popularity of historian David Starkey and historical fiction writer Philippa Gregory, who cover the period.
To this extent, Henry’s age is like the Abdication Crisis of 1936 or the story of Britain standing alone against Europe in 1940 — a moment in history that will remain forever fascinating to us.
I don’t, in fact, agree with Mantel’s reading of history. The central drama of Wolf Hall concerns Henry VIII’s determination to divorce the first of his six wives, Catherine of Aragon, to marry Anne Boleyn — against the wishes of the Pope.
To get around the Pope, Henry split from Rome and appointed himself head of a Protestant English Church so he could divorce as he pleased. But Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, a great man of exceptional intelligence, insisted the King could not make himself head of the Church and, as a matter of conscience, refused to back down. So Henry had him executed for treason.
Mantel’s distortion of the character of More is grotesque. She makes him out to be a brutal persecutor of Protestants — he was severe, but these were severe times — while ignoring his extraordinary integrity in refusing to accept the King, or the State, had authority over his or any other human’s conscience.
To my mind, More was the forerunner of dissidents such as novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the USSR or opposition leader Aung San Su Kyi in Burma, who stand up against the brutal power of the state making itself into God.
MEANWHILE, Mantel makes a hero out of the Protestant Thomas Cromwell, even though he was a brute and a thug — Starkey called him ‘Alastair Campbell with an axe’ — who helped Henry VIII destroy England’s great churches, monasteries, schools and universities, and its links with European civilisation.
But the fact that my view of history does not chime with hers is immaterial. The point is that this is fiction — and excellent fiction at that.
And historical fiction like hers has never been so popular. We have lived through a generation when proper history, about kings and queens and religion and battles, was frowned upon by chippy teachers in schools. But Mantel is on the side of those who see history as a wonderful story.
As she said after winning the Man Booker, in her side swipe at E. L. James’s Fifty Shades Of Grey and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, books about ‘whips and chains or boy wizards’ will always have their attractions — but it is important there should be an appetite for more demanding works.
She has more than managed to satisfy that appetite for thousands of readers — after escaping a personal world of misery to bring England to life at the most decisive moment in its history.