THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 83
girl from evil spirits that inhabit their
house.) Sometimes this shadow world
of lurking evil turns out to be explica-
ble. In “Eight Months on Ghazzah
Street” (1988), Frances, an English-
woman who has accompanied her en-
gineer husband to Saudi Arabia, finds
herself a virtual prisoner in their apart-
ment complex, where whispered com-
ings and goings on the stairs and in the
hallways provoke a growing paranoia
in her, a “feeling that something is going
on, just outside her range of vision.” Her
conviction that she has detected a crim-
inal cabal operating out of the apart-
ment upstairs is questioned by every-
one around her until the truth explodes,
with devastating results. Frances is one
of a number of Mantel’s female char-
acters who must struggle to make them-
selves believed.
In other works, the border between
natural and supernatural collapses under
the pressure of unreason and suffering.
In what may be Mantel’s masterpiece,
“Beyond Black” (2005), a creamily lus-
cious prose stands in disconcerting con-
trast to the bizarrenesses and horrors it
narrates. Its protagonist is Alison, a mor-
bidly obese medium who has to con-
tend with some very real spirits, in par-
ticular a band of thugs led by a ghoul
called Morris, who likes to lounge
around her room playing with his fly.
The irrepressible dead torment her as
mercilessly now as they did when they
were alive: when Alison was a child, we
learn, they raped and tortured her. Man-
tel’s ghosts embody the histories that
we can’t bury.
In an interview, Mantel referred with
startling matter-of-factness to the pres-
ence of ghosts in her own life: “When
I was a child I believed our house was
haunted, and so—worryingly—did the
grown-ups.” In a 2003 memoir called,
unsurprisingly, “Giving Up the Ghost,”
she writes of how, when she was seven,
she witnessed something uncanny in
the yard behind the family home: a rip-
ple in the fabric of the afternoon, a dis-
turbance in the atmosphere that, to her
mind, had to do with “the nature of evil.”
The recurrent figure of the ghost in
Mantel’s works bridges two paramount
themes: the lingering presence of the
pasts we would forget, and the opacity
of the evils, impervious to sense and im-
possible to “pattern,” that we suffer in
the present. The darkness of her themes
and the rebarbative strangeness of the
narratives in which she clothed them
may not have won her international fan-
dom, but they bespeak a genuine and
bracing originality.A
stonished helplessness in the pres-
ence of unreason and cruelty was
what brought Mantel to the genre with
which she is most closely identified
today. In “Giving Up the Ghost,” she
details the sufferings inflicted on her
not only by the ignorant and vindictive
nuns who taught her as a child, but also,
later in life, by a long line of doctors
who failed to take seriously a devastat-
ing chronic illness. Starting in her early
adolescence, Mantel displayed symp-
toms of what turned out to be a severe
case of endometriosis, a condition in
which cells that normally appear inside
the uterus grow outside it, causing crip-
pling pain. Her symptoms were dis-
missed initially as psychosomatic or
signs of a psychiatric illness. (Treated
with antipsychotic drugs, she later ex-
perienced psychotic episodes.) It wasn’t
until she was in her twenties, when she
did her own research and diagnosed the
problem, that proper treatment began.
At university, Mantel studied law,
and in her memoir she writes of hav-
ing developed an interest in the ques-
tion of where “the powers of the state
begin and end.” During her
illness, she read extensively
about the French Revolution
and found in that history
an external correlative to ex-
periences she understood all
too well from her time in
school and in the clinics. “I
began to read about the old
regime, its casual cruelties, its
heartless style,” she writes. “I
thought, but I know this stuff.
By nature, I knew about despotism:
the unratified decisions, handed down
from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the
face of strength when it moves in on
the weak.”
From that epiphany resulted the first
novel that Mantel wrote, in 1979. (It
wasn’t published until 1992.) “A Place
of Greater Safety” is a work of histor-
ical fiction that entwines the lives
of three leaders of the Revolution—
Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins,and Maximilien Robespierre—from
their childhoods until their early deaths
at the hands of the movement they cre-
ated. Mantel has recalled of her research,
“I had pressed the juice of meaning
from every scrap of paper ... every note
on every source,” but the book’s more
than seven hundred pages suggest that
she hadn’t yet figured out how to bal-
ance “history” and “fiction.” Among
other things, her characters too often
do what characters in historical fiction
are, mortifyingly, forced to do, which is
to emblematize or give voice to entire
currents in history or thought. (“Free
thought, free speech—is that too much
to ask?”)
What Mantel needed, but hadn’t yet
found, was a historical period and a
historical figure that could serve, nat-
urally and organically, as vehicles for
further exploring the themes she’d al-
ways been interested in. Where is the
boundary between truth and lies? Where
does the power of the state begin and
end? Is it possible to break away from
the past, and, if so, to what extent? How
does the conflict between a modern
trust in reason, on the one hand, and
primitive ignorance and irrationality,
on the other, play out in the lives of
individuals and of nations?
As it turned out, she needn’t have
strayed to Paris to find an apt topic.
For—as the world knows by now—the
hero of the work she embarked
on after she published “Be-
yond Black” is Cromwell, the
innovative statesman who
helped drag England from the
Plantagenet Middle Ages into
the early modern era, remaking
it as a bureaucratic state while
battling entrenched class priv-
ilege and religious fanaticism:
a man who tried to maneuver
between ambitious ideals and
stubbornly irrational realities and lost
his head doing so.C
ritics reviewing the first two nov-
els were unanimous in their ad-
miration for how “utterly modern” they
felt, the way in which they conjured a
“powerful hallucination of presence.”
Although Mantel occasionally deploys
archaic diction (“gralloched”) or syn-
tax (“no man shall have a fowl in his
pot but he pay a levy on it”) to suggest