Obituary: Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel 6th July 1952–22nd September 2022

A manuscript came in the post from Saudi Arabia one day in 1984, a wickedly dark comedy set in the world of social work and black magic called Every Day is Mother’s Day. It was pretty well perfect, reminiscent of Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark perhaps, but with a voice all of its own, creating a gothic world suspended between a weary and literal world of the Midlands in the 1970s and an alternative one leaching out into myth and horror. I met the author soon after, a modest, bright-eyed Hilary Mantel, whose background was hard to fathom but whose intensity showed purpose. After a couple of rejections I was delighted to find an enthusiastic publisher in Carmen Callil at Chatto. The freshness of the imagination and the sharpness of the humour caught the attention of reviewers and Auberon Waugh, in a stroke of genius, appointed Hilary his film critic at the Spectator. Coming to film with mock ignorance allowed her the luxury of riffing on—for instance—the uses of mud in overblown historical epics. Her satirical talent was being honed, and it led to a lifelong passion for serious films.

Other novels followed, each pursuing a different theme and period, but circling around loss, evil, magic, memory, Catholicism, childlessness; set in Saudi Arabia, Botswana, 18th century London, Derbyshire. Hilary labelled them: A Change of Climate was her bourgeois novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street her Saudi novel, The Giant O’Brien her Irish novel... As she moved from subject to subject, readers and critics found it hard to keep track, or yet to see common threads, but there was a sprinkling of prizes recognising the literary excellence she displayed.

From time to time there would be surprises. She rang rather sheepishly one day to say that there would be an article in the Observer including a description (and, cheekily, a valuation) of the huge historical novel she had lost hope of getting published before she had sent us Every Day is Mother’s Day: would I mind reading all 1,600 pages of it? Over a summer holiday A Place of Greater Safety revealed itself as a unique masterpiece, technically brilliant, impeccably researched, emotionally overwhelming. It took a while for readers and critics to realise quite what it was, but it did win the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and, in the years afterwards, every now and then an article would appear celebrating it as the greatest historical novel of recent times.

Speaking out

Lurking in the background was always chronic ill health. She was diffident about drawing attention to it, but decided one day to go public and write about endometriosis, which had assailed her in its most extreme form in her early 20s and had led to permanent damage. She became a prominent spokesperson for the recognition and early diagnosis of the condition. Also lurking in the background was the bizarre family history: during her childhood, her father was turfed out of the family and never mentioned again. Her stepfather Jack was an oppressive figure in what was an oppressive childhood with a severe Catholic education in a sectarian northern town. Writing about all this in her memoir Giving up the Ghost and indirectly in her short story collection Learning to Talk gave her audience some clues about the themes she came back to time after time in her fiction. On many levels this background provided the essential material for her novels, exploring life lived in different and parallel realities: the constant danger of certainty leaching into uncertainty, or disintegrating catastrophically. It is no coincidence that a seminal book for her was Sanity, Madness and the Family by Aaron Esterson and Ronald David Laing.

On many levels [Mantel’s] background provided the essential material for her novels, exploring life lived in parallel and different realities

I only once heard Hilary express despair at the arbitrariness of the publishing game. On publication of Beyond Black, indisputably her darkest and funniest novel, which had good reviews but wasn’t taking off commercially, she said to me: “What more do I have to do to make a success of it?” She’d written to the very best of her ability, promoted to the limit of her physical capacity, but saw that so much of it was a crap shoot. Not long after, when we were talking about other things, she asked tentatively if I thought that a novel giving the Henry VIII story from the perspective of Cromwell was a good idea. It wasn’t hard to say yes.

All the elements that made her unique came together spectacularly in The Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her wit, stylistic daring, creative ambition and phenomenal historical insight mark her out as one of the greatest novelists of our time, recognised of course by her unprecedented winning of two Booker Prizes for successive titles and her international success, which she embraced gleefully. While writing the books she developed deep friendships with eminent manuscript curator Mary Robertson, to whom the three books are all dedicated, and Diarmaid MacCullough, the eminent historian. She loved working with actors on the adaptations and developed a close partnership with Ben Miles, the stage Cromwell, with whom the adventure of delving into Cromwell’s life eventually became a joint activity, together with Miles’ photographer brother George. The stage versions brought her into the Royal Shakespeare Company, which she became a patron of: a huge delight as theatre was one of her lifelong passions.