A Place of Greater Safety

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Louis XVI, highly popular as late as the summer of 1790, would, two and a half years later, lose his life on the guillotine. Even when his execution had actually taken place, it still seemed almost more like fiction than fact. It's understandable, then, that a late-20th-century novelist, Hilary Mantel, working at a much greater remove, should turn the tables and make the principal figures of the Revolution the main characters in I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to ­become a historian. So it began as second best. I had to tell myself a story about the French Revolution—the story of the revolution by some of the people who made it, rather than by the revolution’s enemies. About 15 years ago, Hilary Mantel got on a plane to Russia, on a cultural visit to Perm, near the Ural mountains. I was part of the group. As we readied ourselves for the flight, she explained that she’d be quiet for the next few hours; she was planning to immerse herself in a new project. It was, she explained, set in Tudor England, at the time of the great break with Rome, and featured both Henry VIII and his notorious chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell. And so if we would excuse her, she had lots to do.

feel, how they react, how they think. She has the kind of long view that enables her convincingly to take up a character in childhood and bring him or her to dramatic adulthood. Just as important, she knows how to make us sympathize. There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. Here, too, we are in good hands, since these shifts of perspective add an aura of reality to the interior monologues, of truth to the exterior descriptions. And, of course, Ms. Mantel makes ample use of the period's climactic Of course, I’m very concerned about not pretending they’re like us. That’s the whole fascination—they’re just not. It’s the gap that’s so interesting. And then there are other ways in which they are like us. While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else.Mantel has done her research, explored deep into the sources, as we know she always does. What the historical novel gives us beyond those facts is imaginative proximity. The historian cannot attribute motivation but the novelist must go deep into the head, find desire, faith, love and hatred – and in the characters of the French Revolution she does, to brilliant effect. Danton most of all is made real, a man of fear and hope, desire and equivocation. And she brings to life the ordinary people whom Marie Antoinette sees on her way to the scaffold, the glass-workers who down tools and stream out for revolution. No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion.

Did the book reviewing make you see your own work within a context? Did you feel your novels were related to other schools of fiction? cast of characters is wide and varied, from a conventional civil servant to Robespierre and his acid sister, Charlotte, from Choderlos de Laclos, the author of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," to the naive and enthusiastic Lucile,for Ms. Mantel. To make its earthshaking developments come alive through their participants is a noble ambition, but in the end we are left to wonder whether more novel and less history might not better suit this author's unmistakable Something like that. A lot of things had happened in French Revolution scholarship since then. The bicentenary had come and gone, and there had been a revolution in feminist history. When I read my draft, I saw that the women were wallpaper. There had been no material. Today you would think, Well, I must invent some, then. At the time I hadn’t seen the need—I hadn’t thought the women were interesting. My life was more like the life of an eighteenth-century man than like the life of an eighteenth-century woman. And I suppose I didn’t really ask myself the questions. Now I thought, I’ve got to work this harder. This, in the end, is the weakness of "A Place of Greater Safety," and because of it the tension between history and fiction is never resolved, not infrequently leaving the reader stranded. It is easy to see why the Revolution proved such a temptation In a speech in 2013, Mantel referred to Kate Middleton, by then the Duchess of Cambridge, as “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung”; a woman whose primary purpose was to provide the heir apparent with heirs of his own. Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron voiced their disapproval but, “if anything,” she says now, “I think my plea was to consider, these are human beings. I’m on her side, not one of her persecutors.” With the royal family yet again in crisis, she connects the current obsession with royal bodies to the themes she’s probing in The Mirror & the Light: “What is a king? Is he a sort of super-being? Or is he a kind of beast? Does he even rise to the status of human? And all this is explored through Henry’s body. So it’s very much a theme I’ve been conscious of continually. And, of course, it was completely misunderstood by numbskulls.”