20 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020THE PERSON WEmeet at the beginning of
Hilary Mantel’s collection of essays is 35
and has already published two novels.
She’s immensely ambitious, but she’s had
some obstacles to literary success: She’s
female; she’s the daughter of Irish Catholic
millworkers; she comes from a village in
England’s industrial North; she has had to
support herself as a barmaid, medical so-
cial worker and department-store assist-
ant; she is married to the boy she met at 16
and has followed him to postings in Africa
and the Middle East; she’s dogged by a
chronic illness. And finally, most damning:
Her chosen genre, historical fiction, is con-
sidered down-market. All of which means
it will take her a bit longer to become her-
self — or rather, to persuade the world of
her prodigious powers. She’s still a long
way from becoming Dame Hilary, interna-
tionally renowned author of the “Wolf
Hall” trilogy.
“Mantel Pieces,” which includes nearly
30 years of Mantel’s essays for The London
Review of Books, accompanied by facsimi-
les of her correspondence with its editors,
is the story of an outsider finding her liter-
ary home. When the book opens, it’s 1987,
and Mantel, with exaggerated self-depre-
cation, is offering her services to a maga-
zine she considers the finest in Europe. “I
was in awe of my paymasters,” she con-
fesses in her introduction, and had decided
to say “ ‘yes’ to anything, especially if it
frightened me.”
Fear is a running theme — and essential
motive — in Mantel’s makeup. The chosen
subjects of her novels and essays are
frankly hair-raising: child murders,
ghosts, the French Revolution and the Tu-
dor monarchy — a period, as she writes,
that signifies “terror in the name of the
church and torture in the name of the
state.”
As a child, “I was often very frightened
and the imprint of that fear stays with me,”
she has said in an interview. Fear alter-
nates with a formidable though somewhat
specialized curiosity throughout this col-
lection, as if knowledge — the child’s need
to decode the system of “pipes and drains,
culverts and sewers” beneath her feet — is
the only thing that will keep her alive.
In the early pieces, we see a working
critic accepting assignments that don’t so
much frighten as bore her. Her riffs on Ma-
donna and “The Hite Report” offer the kind
of acid one-liners English critics can reel
out in their sleep, whereas what we need
her to do is explain the world to us. Her
true province is history, and it’s only once
Mantel-as-reviewer digs down hard into
its rich soil, delving into biographies of Tu-
dor aristocrats or Danton or Robespierre
or Marie Antoinette — fortune’s darlings
who end up headless in the Tower or the
Tuileries — that she truly warms up, mov-ing into a prose whose rhythmic and allu-
sive range, whose nonchalance, bite and
wayward erudition are always surprising,
often thrilling. A Mantel essay will take
you from the Children’s Crusade of 1212 to
the Liverpool supermarket where a tod-
dler is lured to his death. Is the author teas-
ing us? Is such magic legal?
A good third of “Mantel Pieces” is de-
voted to kings and queens and courtiers,
another third to the revolutionaries who
are out to string them up. It’s clear where
Mantel’s sympathies lie: Royals are
mythic, archaic, “both gods and beasts,”
but it’s their assassins — the stiff-backed,
lawyerly, provincial fanatics — whom she
loves. (It’s revealing that in her “Wolf Hall”trilogy she manages to spin her protago-
nist, Thomas Cromwell, not as courtier but
as revolutionary: radical Protestant, pro-
tocapitalist numbers-cruncher.)
“Mantel Pieces” includes the author’s
most celebrated essay, “Royal Bodies.”
When The London Review published it in
2013, there were death threats, practically,
from Britain’s right-wing press. Mantel’s
offense was to compare Kate Middleton,Prince William’s wife, to a plastic doll. But
actually the essay’s most incendiary mo-
ment is when Mantel, at a Buckingham
Palace reception, finds herself staring at
the queen: “I passed my eyes over her as a
cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp
enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
“The force of my devouring curiosity,” she
writes, was enough to make Elizabeth II
look back over her shoulder with an ex-
pression of “hurt bewilderment.”
Mantel doesn’t hate the queen; she’s just
curious about the hole in her center, the
fact that monarchy has made her “a thing
which only had meaning when it was ex-
posed.”
This anti-institutional bent is whatdrives Mantel’s imaginative intelligence,
flaming out in unexpected places. It drives
her to describe the Virgin Mary statuettes
that haunt her Catholic girlhood, perched
in niches like CCTV cameras, watching her
every move with “painted eyes of police-
man blue.” It drives her in “The Hair Shirt
Sisterhood,” a brilliant disquisition on eat-
ing disorders, sainthood and the church’s
misogyny, to a defense of young girls who
choose anorexia: “It is a way of shrinking
back, of reserving, preserving the self....
For a year or two, it may be a valid strat-
egy; to be greensick, to be out of the game;
to die just a little; to nourish the inner be-
ing while starving the outer being; to buy
time.”
The origins of her resistance to institu-
tional power, her sympathy for the unsym-
pathetic, Mantel has examined in an earli-
er memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost.” She de-
scribes the first day of school in her indus-
trial Derbyshire village: “I thought that I
had come among lunatics; and the teach-
ers, malign and stupid, seemed to me like
the lunatics’ keepers. I knew you must not
give in to them.” Education is the tradi-
tional leg up for clever children from rack-
ety working-class backgrounds like hers.
Mantel, however, from her first glimpse of
a classroom, recognized “the need to resist
what I found there.”
She might say the same of her experi-
ence of the medical establishment, as
glanced at in “Meeting the Devil,” an essay
in “Mantel Pieces.” Riven since puberty by
agonizing period pains and torrential
bleeding, Mantel is gaslighted for decades
by (male) doctors who palm her off with
antidepressants and, yes, antipsychotics.
Even after she has correctly diagnosed herown endometriosis and undergone an op-
eration removing her ovaries and uterus,
as well as part of her bladder and bowels,
the pain and exhaustion are unrelenting.
The drugs Mantel will need to take for the
rest of her life cause gargantuan weight
gain. The author of these essays, you are
reminded, is someone in chronic pain,
someone whose own body has become un-
recognizable to her. What she’s left with is
the ferociously lucid mind, the unruly de-
light of her mocking and self-mocking hu-
mor.
My favorite sentence in this book is un-
characteristically quiet, almost plaintive,
let fall sotto voce in the middle of a hospi-
tal-bed memory: “I wonder, though, if
there is a little saint you can apply to, if you
are a person with holes in them?”
I suspect we all are people with holes in
them, and there are many saints to apply
to. For those who feel compelled to exam-
ine not just their own “perforations” but
the world’s, St. Hilary is your woman. 0Royals and Rebels
Hilary Mantel’s new collection compiles nearly 30 years’ worth of essays.
By FERNANDA EBERSTADT
FERNANDA EBERSTADT’Snovels include “The
Furies” and “RAT.”
MANTEL PIECES
Royal Bodies and Other Writing From The
London Review of Books
By Hilary Mantel
333 pp. 4th Estate. $26.99.
Hilary MantelPHOTOGRAPH BY ELS ZWEERINKRoyals are mythic, archaic,
‘both gods and beasts,’ but it’s
their assassins whom she loves.