Reviewing the arts can sometimes feel like curating a museum. There is a temptation (predominantly, though not exclusively, felt on the Right) to act as if all the great works are behind us, and our role is to preserve all we can — or perhaps to lament what has come since. Hilary Mantel, who died last week at 70, was the writer I would most often point to in order to argue that some of the arts, in fact, are flourishing. Mantel’s three-volume trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light) was a masterwork. Adaptations of the three have made notable recent contributions to stage drama and prestige television as well, two other categories that continue to thrive.
The Wolf Hall books followed the career of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister to King Henry VIII and the architect of the English Reformation. In Mantel’s hands, Cromwell became (quite ahistorically, but artistically convincingly) a sort of patron saint of modernity, full of moderation, good sense, and a sharp sense of humor. In the first novel, he engineered the downfall of Sir (Saint) Thomas More, in this portrayal a religious fanatic and the embodiment of all that was darkest about the Middle Ages. In the second volume, Cromwell arranged the destruction and execution of Anne Boleyn, his chief rival for the management of Henry VIII and, thus, of England. Only at the end of the third novel, which largely focuses on Cromwell’s time in undisputed power, did Cromwell’s own time on the block come.
The novels were a sensation among the literati and the public alike. The first two each won the Man Booker Prize (the “British Pulitzer”) — making Mantel the first Briton to win it twice. All three were adapted into plays for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The first two (with the third likely to come) were also made into miniseries for the BBC, starring Mark Rylance.
Part of Mantel’s achievement, a very large part, lay in her literary talent. She was supremely gifted in that form of narration that can be hard to control even for good writers: the stream-of-consciousness. Closely related was her ability to adjust her narrative voice, switching seamlessly from omniscience to the limitations of one man (Cromwell’s) view of the world. And yet, for all the seemingly effortless flow of her verse, Mantel could pull the reader up short with a tight, perfectly crafted aphorism. To read her was a pure pleasure.
Yet there was also a seriousness beneath it, for another part of her achievement was her vision. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that Wolf Hall inverts another stage-and-screen masterpiece, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. It is a mark of the level of Mantel’s artistic accomplishment that the many admirers of the pro-More work (including myself), who often disagreed strongly with Mantel’s views on religion and the proper ordering of human society (ditto), had to admit the artistic and philosophical seriousness of the recent challenger.
Mantel, therefore, stands in a long line of artists, from William Shakespeare to Friedrich Schiller to Gaetano Donizetti to Bolt, to take the Tudors as a serious subject of drama and to produce out of them profound works on the human condition. It would not surprise me to find her work alongside theirs on a syllabus 50 or 100 years from now.
Mantel achieved true fame late in life. She had written several earlier novels, including another work of serious historical fiction set during the French Revolution’s Terror, A Place of Greater Safety, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Yet many more readers were to come across these after 2009’s Wolf Hall, wondering what else its gifted author had written.
In so wondering, the world found a personal story as well — one of an unhappy childhood and first marriage, as well as serious health struggles whose impact Mantel was open about. Notably, there was a crisis of faith that led Mantel to a place that could be said less to be ex-Catholic than anti-Catholic. Readers and critics alike debated the extent to which these experiences affected her writing, particularly the Wolf Hall series. There was no doubt they did. Mantel was also unabashed and unsparing in her political views. Here, she didn’t so much leave her politics out of her writing as she sublimated such questions into the deeper vision that underlay her worldview, achieving art rather than screed.
There were also, thankfully, happier portions of her biography, particularly her marriage to Gerald McEwen, who survives her. And, of course, there was the monumental achievement of Wolf Hall. Seventy is not so old an age at this point, and one cannot help wondering what else the world may have lost in her death.
Nicholas M. Gallagher is an attorney and writer who lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
