Editor’s Note: With the death of Hilary Mantel this year, English lost one of its most adept magicians. Just months before her passing, poet April Bernard had been yearning to write for us about Mantel on the occasion of her last published book.

After seeing the piece we published in Book Post (excerpted below), Mantel wrote me to say: "I have been having a really rough week health-wise, and it really lifted my spirits.” She was to live for one more month. We were glad to have this chance to honor a career that scrutinized the world and the self with equal vigor.  

—Ann Kjellberg, Editor of Book Post

Before Hilary Mantel became, by publishing standards, a phenomenon, with the Wolf Hall trilogy (Wolf Hall, 2009; Bring Up the Bodies, 2012; The Mirror and the Light, 2020), she was already widely admired as one of the most clever and provoking of contemporary British writers.  

If you hadn’t read the terrifying Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, about an English woman living in culturally-enforced isolation in Saudi Arabia, or the domestic comic-horror novel Every Day is Mother’s Day, or any of her half-dozen other fine novels, you might have seen some of her trenchant pieces, mostly in The London Review of Books, on film, literature, and cultural puzzles such as Madonna and the British royal family. (Some of these have been collected, most recently, in a volume I highly recommend, called Mantel Pieces.) 

The novel A Place of Greater Safety, published in 1992 after nearly twenty years of research, is a lively, yet staggeringly detailed and massive, account of the French Revolution from the point of view of three of its revolutionary figures, and won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize. (Her many other prizes include the Booker, which she has famously won twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.)

In her last  collection of seven brief, yet very deep, stories, the author revisits scenes and tales from her haunted childhood. It is a wondrous book, funny and moving, even better in many ways than her earlier autobiographical work, Giving Up the Ghost (2003).

Apparently Mantel is, in life, something of a klutz—when writing about herself, she alludes to her clumsiness with everyday household objects and tasks; more seriously, she also writes about a lifetime suffering with, and managing, disabling illness. In her fiction and essays, meanwhile, she has consistently shown herself to be a deft, even magician-like, mechanic of storytelling. Whenever I have had occasion to discuss Mantel’s Wolf Hall with other writers, we marvel at the dense weave of story-lines, the seamless movement between verb tenses, the looming of history’s Big Picture never lost as the minute details of life are lived. 

Hauntings—the visitations of ghosts and devils in the absence, sadly, of any hope of a benevolent god—appear not in the form of metaphors, or not only in the form of metaphors, but of actualities, as the impressionable imagination of a young girl matures into an adult sensibility that will not disavow the supernatural. One of the stories in Learning to Talk, “Third Floor Rising,” describes the narrator’s first job, at the department store where her mother also works. The store, vast and menacing, is a place where clothes disappear, doors slam themselves, and disembodied screams are heard. When the narrator revisits the place years later, the “imagined” hauntings are not dispelled with time but are confirmed, by new reports: “I realized that, in those years, everything had been far worse than it seemed at the time.”

I’ve come to love the stubbornness of a brilliant scholar and artist who, at least in this one respect, disdains rationality. Mantel, raised Catholic, became an apostate while quite young; but she doggedly shares the English Catholic intellectual tradition of belief—if not in heaven, then certainly in that other place.

—April Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her most recent book is Brawl & Jag: Poems. Her sixth volume of poems, The World Behind the World, will appear in 2023.

To read the full review, visit Book Post.

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