Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Enough to make me an LRB subscriber

Hilary Mantel has been reviewing books for and writing essays for the London Review of Books since, I believe, 1987. Her recently-published collection, Mantel Pieces, is subtitled, “Royal Bodies and Other Writings from the London Review of Books.” So in one sense what you’re reading here is pretty thin stuff: a review of a collection of reviews. Worse, Mantel is a better writer than this ink stained-wretch.

Mantel is the author of the Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both Man Booker Prize-winners, and The Mirror & the Light—The Wolf Hall Trilogy, which The New York Times claimed “is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade.” They are the story of Thomas Cromwell, who born to a working-class family becomes the right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1527 and manages to retain Henry VIII’s favor after Wolsey is executed. He assists in the king’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn and break from Rome and establishment of the Church of England. 

Even people who don’t like historical fiction (we exist) or who don’t like long books or who don’t like long books of historical fiction respond to the trilogy. Mantel Pieces suggests why. She’s a terrific writer, a thorough researcher, and a clear thinker. (Her ability to think clearly may explain why she’s such a clear writer.)

The reviews extend from a 1988 review of Shere Hite’s third book on the sex lives of American women to a 2017 review of a biography of Margaret Pole, who was beheaded in 1541. Review subjects include John Osborne, Madonna, Christopher Marlow, Jane Boleyn (Anne’s sister-in-law), Eunice Williams (a Massachusetts settler taken by Mohawk Indians in 1704), Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, and Théroigne de Méricourt (“a woman washed up on the [French] revolution’s inhospitable shore”).

These are not quick summaries that conclude with a couple of judgmental sentences. Mantel brings in research from other books, other reading. She does not give a book a one to five-star rating and move on, but puts it into a context and provides enough information for the reader to draw her own conclusion. For example:

“Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book [Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower] comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalizing machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and scholarly, and her work is acknowledged in Higginbotham’s biography which is less detailed, but serious and judicious. Based in North Carolina, Higginbotham is a lawyer by background and has written several novels, spanning different eras . . . .”

In addition to the reviews, Mantel Pieces includes three interesting essays, an account of first meeting her stepfather as a six-year-old written in the voice of a six-year-old (and worth therefore studying as a piece of writing; it was almost enough to send me to my computer); an account of a medical procedure that sounds as if went wrong and almost killed her; and the piece that apparently provoked a tempest in England, “Royal Bodies: From Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013).

Mantel says in her introduction that ten days after the piece appeared in the LRB, reporters were scouring her village looking for comment. Her husband told her “the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were denouncing me. Neither, I believe, had read my lecture. Very few people had read it, but I was still Monster of the Month.”

She reports attending an event at which the Prince of Wales handed out a  literary award. She had never seen him before, “and at once I thought: what a beautiful suit! What sublime tailoring!” A little later she went to a book trade event at Buckingham Palace. As the queen passed, “I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner.” 

Her reaction, says Mantel, was not toward a person but to the monarchy, “a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.” That began to change in 1980 “with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs.” Diana, she says, was more royal than the royal family. “Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief” but in the end England did not change.

She writes about Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s need for an heir. She reports on a paper that speculates that the king had Kells positive blood. “When a woman who is Kells negative conceives by a man who is Kells positive, she will, if the foetus itself is Kells positive, become sensitized; her immune system will try to reject the foetus.” If so, it makes the history of Henry’s reign a biological rather than a moral tragedy. 

She concludes by asking whether monarchy is a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? She writes that the English are happy “to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs.” No wonder she became Monster of the Month.

The reviews and essays are separated by letters to and from Mantel and her editor at the LRB; these talk about the work at hand and works in progress. In November 2005, Mantel wrote about Thomas Cromwell, “Oh, the joy of having a main character who’s not neurotic! I wish I’d thought of it before.” Mantel Pieces is enough to make me a LBR subscriber. 

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