And the way leads on to the second sublime book in the Wolf Hall trilogy, her second Booker prize. Take her hand, slide into that consciousness, trust her intelligence and listen to the story. At first, there’s a slight unfamiliarity with the storytelling voice, a hint of ambiguity.
I think there are places at the start of Wolf Hall where Mantel needs you to trust her. Some gave up after the first few pages, others kept reading. I know a few readers who’ve said this to me. “I started reading Wolf Hall but I found it confusing.”
What more can we ask? This is literature so satisfying, I wouldn’t care if she’d set the books in a futuristic Italian spaghetti orchard. But plunging into a maelstrom of humanity as rich and meaningful today as it ever was, who’s counting the years?ĭo we read these two books and come away changed, wiser, gobsmacked at the language and the talent? I did. The story she has chosen is indeed a fascinating one her perspective even more so. Sad, because Mantel’s fierce intellect, subversive wit, and deep understanding of the mind make any genre classification redundant. Sad, because people who say this are going to miss so much. Even well-regarded booksellers have been known to refer to Mantel fans as “Tudor nuts”. This is perhaps the most frequent comment I’ve heard from people who haven’t read the first two books of the trilogy. Can she add a third prize to the net, ten years after her last? If anyone can, it will be Mantel. I simply feel indebted to her for her skills, her labours, and the diamond-cut world she reveals. Mantel is an extraordinarily intelligent writer at the top of her game, with superb command of language and material. So good, it feels a little arrogant to even consider reviewing it. She is the only person ever to win the prize for 2 novels in a trilogy.įor me, Wolf Hall was a brilliant literary read, but Bring up the Bodies was so good it astonished me. Mantel won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and took out the 2012 Booker Prize after publication of the second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies.
And her book Beyond Black certainly requires patient reading through its dense prose style but this is repaid a thousandfold by the wickedly dark humour and magnificent imagination driving one of the weirdest books ever written.īut Wolf Hall? And Bring Up The Bodies? These books are simply in another league.
In fact, halfway through her enormous 1992 novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, I was wondering if I’d live long enough to get to the end of it. “I read another book by Hilary Mantel and didn’t like it.”
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