The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A final séance with the ghost of Hilary Mantel
This non-fiction collection reveals the ‘Wolf Hall’ writer’s acuity
MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF by Hilary Mantel
400pp, John Murray, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £14.99 “When I began to write, it was my first ambition to write a good historical novel and my second to write a good ghost story,” Hilary Mantel confessed in a 2007 essay titled “Touching Hands with the Lost”. Today, she reigns supreme as the queen of the first type of book: the achievement of her Wolf Hall trilogy, twice the recipient of Booker Prizes, is universally acknowledged.
I’d bet, however, that only a small proportion of Wolf Hall fans have also read the novel that preceded her foray into the court of Henry VIII, a brilliant example of the second type. Beyond Black (2005) is the story of a psychic named Alison, her manager-partner Colette, and their gloomy, spirit-hounded peregrinations around the grotty edge of the commuter-belt lands of the London suburbs. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Mantel’s masterpiece.
“Touching Hands with the Lost” is the last of the 71 brilliant pieces included in A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing. Selected and introduced by Mantel’s editor of 20 years, Nicholas Pearson, the collection arrives just over a year after its author died, in September 2022, age 70. It is, notionally, Mantel’s final book; the new novel on which she had been working, an Austen “mash-up” titled Provocation, exists in only very early form. (Her widower Gerald McEwen judged two paragraphs to be finished: they were read at Mantel’s memorial service earlier this spring.)
As well as essays originally published in the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and her five 2017 BBC Reith Lectures – in which she discusses the perils and pleasures involved in writing historical fiction – are a selection of the reviews she wrote for The Spectator during her four-year tenure as their film critic.
There’s something of the great Pauline Kael’s writing in Mantel’s crisp, sharp, droll summations. “Director Stephen Frears had such a great success with My Beautiful Laundrette that he is now a great authorA ity on homosexuality, and perhaps on any ambience which features plumbing,” she writes with delicious dryness in her review of Prick Up Your Ears (1987), a film in which public lavatories play a notable role. And has Wallace Shawn – whose face she describes as that “of a questing grub” – ever been better depicted?
By and large, however, this collection leans towards meditations on the writing life, with an emphasis on the challenges of being a historical novelist. As such, it’s a rich and illuminating coda to both Mantel’s life and career, but lacks some of her best pieces. It’s missing, for example, her infamous “Royal Bodies” lecture-turned-essay from 2013, which incited furore due to her description of the now-Princess of Wales as “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore”. This has already appeared in Mantel Pieces (2020), a collection of pieces first published in the London Review of Books.
Sadly absent, too, are Mantel’s very best essays on pain and illness: severe endometriosis left her postmenopausal and infertile at 27, and – as she writes in one of the few pieces here that does touch on the topic – “an unwilling stranger in my own body” for the rest of her life.
Was it because of this that she was so well-attuned to the delicate, dangerous viscera of embodied experience? I’m struck by her description of the “bewilderment” she felt in her “fingertips” the first time an exam question required original thought rather than the regurgitation of facts.
Like poor, put-upon Alison in Beyond Black, Mantel lived in a world in which “the restless dead assert[ed] their claims”, scratching at the doors, tapping on the windowpanes, always whispering. “The task of historical fiction,” she writes, “is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in the body.” In “Persons from Porlock” she describes how, while trying to write the last pages of Wolf Hall, she “haunted” the walled garden of the flats where she lived, “walking round and round in the rain… following my ghostly characters, Tudor lawyers walking arm-inarm in the drizzle, talking about the trial of Thomas More.” Now we’re the ones stumbling along behind the spectral figure of Mantel herself, eager for her every last word.