82 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
“I said not to touch it.”• •
might call the Walter Scott approach—
is to focus on exteriors, to dress things
up with florid gold script and quaint
period diction, with feathers, furbe-
lows, and frills. Another way emerged
in the mid-twentieth century, when
Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of
Hadrian” (1951) and Hermann Broch’s
dauntingly monumental exercise in
stream of consciousness, “The Death
of Virgil” (1945), brought a modernist
interiority to the genre—and in so doing
raised the fraught question of the ex-
tent to which a writer could enter into
the mentality of the past. Those works,
as many saw it, attained to the level of
High Literature.
The ingenious way Mantel had, in
the first two installments of the “Wolf
Hall” trilogy, of making you feel as if
you were eavesdropping on Crom-
well’s thoughts suggests that she’s
aligned herself with Yourcenar and
Broch. But, if she didn’t bother to beat
her tale with hammers and chains, it
was also because she had an agenda
of her own. On close inspection, the
books about Henry VIII and his world
turned out to have been animated by
the same themes and preoccupations
that have been at the center of her
work all along.S
tarting with her début, the creepily
effective black comedy “Every Day
Is Mother’s Day,” about a put-upon
young social worker faced with a dis-
turbing case, it has been clear that Man-
tel is interested in the past. But the his-
tories she explored tended to be the
unhappy pasts that individuals and fam-
ilies so often try to suppress, usually
unsuccessfully and sometimes with di-
sastrous results. Unlike many in the
boys’ club of popular British authors,
from Martin Amis to Kazuo Ishiguro,
the younger Mantel, who until “Wolf
Hall” was something of an outsider in
the British literary establishment, chose
to focus on a seamy, often ugly under-
side of English life: the grubby prov-
inces, the crazy charwomen and delu-
sional mediums, people and places with
pasts worth fleeing. “But you have to
put the past behind you, don’t you?” a
character asks rhetorically in “Vacant
Possession,” the sequel to “Every Day
Is Mother’s Day.” “If it will let you,”comes the response. In Mantel, it usu-
ally doesn’t.
“A Change of Climate” wrenchingly
dramatizes this theme. Set in the nine-
teen-eighties, it unfolds the story of a
British couple, Anna and Ralph Eldred,
who were the victims of a horrific act
of violence when they were newlyweds
working for a missionary society in
southern Africa, in the fifties—a crime
triggered when Anna carelessly offends
an employee. (Mantel enjoys contrast-
ing our desire to do good with the lim-
its of our ability to comprehend the
“others” whom we want to help.) Now
back in England, the Eldreds never
mention what happened, but the ap-
parently normal and useful lives they
lead—Ralph runs a family charity—
are riven by fissures through which
their past suffering rises to the surface,
like a poisonous vapor, threatening to
destroy the equilibrium they thought
they’d achieved.
As for inauthenticity and inaccura-
cies, the misrepresentations that Mantel
likes to expose aren’t of the anachronistic-
chimney-stack kind. What interests her
are the half-truths, evasions, and self-de-
lusions that people cling to, often at great
cost, in order to get through their (usu-
ally grim) lives. In “Every Day Is Moth-
er’s Day,” the social worker comes to see
how her colleagues have chosen to de-
lude themselves about the nature of the
suffering and evil that they witness. At
the center of these books stands an un-
settlingly opaque figure, a mentally dis-
turbed young woman named Muriel. At
once malevolent and victimized, she rep-
resents another favorite theme of Man-
tel’s: the presence in life of an irreduc-
ible core of pain and unreason that resists
any genial assumptions about the coher-
ence or redeemability of the world. “I
thought there was order in the world, at
least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a
pattern,” Ralph Eldred reflects in “A
Change of Climate,” speaking for many
of the author’s characters. “But where is
the pattern now?”
Small wonder that Mantel has re-
turned so often to the supernatural—
ghosts, in particular. In many of her
novels, the border between reality and
unreality, sanity and madness, is as fuzzy
as the one between past and present,
truth and lies. (Muriel’s mother abuses
her because she thinks she’s saving the