A Place of Greater Safety

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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. Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.” Now, she says, she’d like to turn the story into a stage play; despite her workload, she’s got “a big box of material”. Is she worried about poking the sleeping bear? She bursts out laughing. “It will be offensive on a scale like they’ve never seen. I shall be absolutely revelling in my capacity to give offence. So whether it will come to fruition or not, I don’t know. But I’m not going to be intimidated by those people.”

In a word of warning, if you know nothing about the French Revolution, this is not the best book from which to increase your knowledge. It helped that I had some idea of dates and times and events and, to a lesser degree, persons from that cataclysmic time in the history of France. Get out your encyclopaedias, your Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy, and there is always good old Google. It would be impossible to summarize the plot without making this an enormously long review, so I will just give the basics here. I will give away the ending, though, because it is historical fact. If you do not want to know the ending, it is fine to skip ahead. Mantel’s novel is about three leading figures of the French Revolution: Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. If the novel could be said to have one main character, I think it would be the brilliant and tragic figure of Desmoulins. The book begins with him as a three-year-old child and ends with his death, along with Danton’s, in April 1794. Mantel does not take her narrative up to Robespierre’s downfall and death, which occurred a few months later, but, of course, readers with knowledge of the French Revolution will know it will happen, and Mantel foreshadows it.I don’t really talk about writing very much to other writers. There’s one writer—Adam Thorpe. Adam lives in France and I never see him, but if he were to walk in, we’d have a proper conversation. It would be about writing. And I think he’s the only person I have that kind of relationship with, and I haven’t heard from him for months. of memoirs had turned into a major industry, and almost everyone, from Lafayette to Napoleon himself, had his own version of events ready for all to read. 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, Long hours. I don’t think I changed my reading speed. I take lots of notes. I might not have been the world’s most insightful reviewer, but I was an ­extremely conscientious one. Once I got the film column, I was highly visible, and I had more work coming in than I could handle. But I was making a living. I was solvent. And I felt I was building something. There’s something very seductive about opening a newspaper if your name is almost always in it. Every weekend, two papers, three papers. If you’re an un-networked person from nowhere, which is exactly what I was, then you realize that you’re drilling away into the heart of the cultural establishment. Mantel has always had a canny understanding of the business of writing. A Place of Greater Safety was the first novel she wrote: “I just thought of myself as a historical novelist, and I thought, do the French Revolution, and then do Thomas Cromwell. And then I couldn’t get that first novel published, so I started writing contemporary fiction. And then I learned that I wasn’t just a historical novelist. But it was there, all the time.” Those early novels, beginning with Every Day Is Mother’s Day in 1985, and looping through Vacant Possession, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, in which she drew on time spent living in Saudi Arabia, and An Experiment in Love, explored among other things the troublesome double-binds in which women frequently find themselves. Those narratives’ vexed interest in the desire for personal freedom and self-creation, and their preoccupation with class and circumstance, is clearly related to the fascination she has for Cromwell.

The thing you’ve got to understand about sixteenth-century life is that male friendship is much more important than your marriage. My take on this Cromwell marriage is that it’s not a love match, it’s a business arrangement. Though they come to love each other, it’s not a great romance. They’re not together very much. He’s virtually a stranger to his younger daughter. So far, so typical. I think the reason I decided to make it a good marriage, rather than a bad marriage, is that after her death, he remained within her family network. Her family continued to live with him. We know a lot more about the marriage of Ralph Sadler, Cromwell’s . . . uh, PA. That was an unlikely marriage because it was a love match. This is something that’s possible in this era. Look at poor Henry himself—he’s the one who’s really ahead of his time, he’s such a romantic. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life – I mean, cruel people, dangerous people – why do you think they are going to be any better after they’re dead?”But by 1793, it is Robespierre whose vision comes to dominate. The National Assembly mutates into another legislative body, the National Convention, who begin the unavoidable process of every revolution: the search for ideological purity. In the summer of 1793, they create the Committee for Public Safety, which institutes the death penalty for anyone whose ideas do not match with those of the revolution – a process that is eventually called the Reign of Terror. The Committee is led by Robespierre, who believes that he is the best person to judge who is and isn’t worthy.