A Place of Greater Safety

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Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn in the television version of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

To meet Danton as the unruliest of boys, then as a happily married young lawyer, helps us to comprehend his emotions as he progresses to the revolutionary leadership he eventually assumes. And it is not only Danton we meet; Ms. Mantel's 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. Restriction, yes. I think it’s good for me as a writer. I don’t think it’s very good for me as a human being. A sort of grimness entered into me, I think, which is still there. I suppose that book always was more important to me than anything else. A lot of your subsequent themes emerged in those first two books—­anorexia, diets, a drowned baby, an obsession with “the royals.”In presenting these characters to the reader, Ms. Mantel weaves in and out of the first-person singular: sometimes we are hearing their thoughts, and sometimes we are dispassionately watching them from the outside; sometimes they speak to us directly. You absolutely are—every day. You have no right to assume that you’ll be able to write because you could write yesterday. On the other hand, when there are dark times, you can say, I’ve faced this before. You learn that you will always have to mark time, that you shouldn’t rush, that if you wait, the book will come to you. But you only build up this knowledge through long experience. Your daily work is very much about the line, the paragraph. It’s not about the grand design of your career. Yes. It was me doing what I do. And I think, for better or worse, it’s me ­doing what only I could do. Nobody else works by this method, with my ideal of fidelity to history. Regardless of whether that’s a good thing, or gets good results, it is a thing I do. When I’m writing a novel about historical figures, I have to be everybody. It’s strenuous. I know what it’s like to inhabit Cromwell, but it never occurred to me that I needed to get inside the bodies of characters like Julianne or Karina, in An Experiment in Love. It was enough to observe them. You know the concept of the good-enough parent—well, sometimes you have to settle for the good-enough character. When the people are real, though dead, I have a different feeling toward them. I consider them my responsibility. In Giving Up the Ghost, Mantel interrogates the question of whether she should be writing about herself at all. “I suppose the topic of censorship and self-censorship has always loomed very large for me,” she says. “What are you allowed to say and who is allowed to say what? And I have taken these books as a kind of project of territorial expansion because they’re right on the central ground of Englishness. Which, as I said in the memoir, I didn’t feel I possessed. I wondered where was this England? Because it didn’t seem to be where I was growing up.”

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. I start from a small core, a glimpse of someone or a little sound bite, and work from there. When I come to write what I call a big scene, especially in the Cromwell novels or any historical material, I prepare for it. Whatever I’ve done before on that scene, I put aside. I read all my notes, all my drafts, and all the source material it’s derived from, then I take a deep breath, and I do it. It’s like walking onstage—with the accompanying stage fright.So then we decided he would come and work with me and we would move to Devon and just change everything. And now here we are. 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