hilary mantel a place of greater safety review

She resolves these visions from a distance, and with what extravagant phrasing! When Mantel was seven, her married and pious mother installed a lover in the family home. The short stories in her collection Learning to Talk are mostly, as Mantel put it, “autoscopic”-they raise a misted spyglass to her early life in the northern county of Derbyshire in the 1950s and 1960s.

In short fiction, essays, and memoir, quite as much as the celebrated novels, each Mantel sentence seems to contain all of her: the grisly consolations of a Catholic girlhood, the exactitude of her legal training and sedulous interest in historical sources, a Gothic view of the body-this last ripened by experience of illness and medical cruelty. The rigor she learned young: “By the time I got into my teens, I had nothing to say, but I had a very good style in which to say it.” Her daring command of figural language came later, after the constraints of a law degree hampered her writing, and she had to rebuild her style to compose A Place of Greater Safety (her first novel but published after several others). Her prose style contains a studied wildness of image and metaphor, like a falcon hooded and trained for the pageant field. But Mantel was more than adept in briefer forms, and much of her wisdom and flair can be celebrated at the level of the sentence.

The scale and intimacy of her portrait of Thomas Cromwell and his world, the wealth of historical fact translated into present-tense closeup: all this has been rightly admired. In the obituaries and articles that have appeared since Hilary Mantel’s death on September 22, the focus has been, understandably, on her historical novels, especially the great trilogy that began with Wolf Hall.

Hilary mantel a place of greater safety review