Mantel Pieces: The New Book from The Sunday Times Best Selling Author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

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The author is, of course, quite brilliant on the Tudors and the various iterations of Henry VIII, from strapping young prince (“Hooray Henry”), through pious apostate (“Holy Henry”) to tyrannical Bluebeard (“Horrid Henry”). But she also argues persuasively that the ageing and increasingly irascible king fits the picture for McLeod syndrome, the symptoms of which include progressive muscular weakness in the lower body, depression, paranoia, and an erosion of personality – which would make the tragedy of his reign “not a moral but a biological tragedy, inscribed on the body”. In his later years Henry suffered from osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone of the leg. ‘Historians,’ says Mantel writes, ‘and, I’m afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away both the personality and the intellect.’ The Murder of James Bulger – what does a murder and the children’s crusade have in common? The question ‘at what age are children responsible for the things they do, especially the horrific things they sometimes do’. Sublime, as you'd expect. What is new, however, is that when she sinks her teeth into a subject, she's brutal: “Our heroine is charmless, foul-mouthed [...] We know that in this film we are seeing the real Madonna - for we know from her other films that she cannot act”. The essays that shine through all focalise on misogyny - the infamous Royal Bodies, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and Britain's Last Witch; she takes figures of history who have been mythologised, and dissects the phallocentric iconography that has warped their image. And as someone who is still haunted by periods of physical and mental ill health, Meeting The Devil is the essay that lingers in my mind with a spectral quality. She writes about the visceral and mental aspects of pain so well:

MANTELPIECE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary MANTELPIECE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

On Charles Brandon – this essay stood out to me because I realised that while I enjoyed reading the review, it made me not want to read the book It's reassuring to see her research in action and to appreciate to what extent it props up her fiction - she ably resists the impulse to infodump everything she knows in her novels, but the foundations as evidenced here are deep and secure. In her essay on Britain's Last Witch, she describes the life of Helen Duncan, a psychic imprisoned in Royal Holloway for divulging state secrets from The Other Side.⠀ I rather admire Hilary the most when she is being deliciously mean as well as rigorously intellectual. A skill she applies across a surprising breadth of topics.The debilitating pain of her endometriosis was initially treated with antipsychotics & then abdominal surgery that left her infertile, treated with steroids that transformed her body. ⠀ Anderson's book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna's wedding was different from other people's.

Hilary Mantel Takes On Royals and Rebels in a Book of Essays Hilary Mantel Takes On Royals and Rebels in a Book of Essays

Two, on very personal topics, were my favorites. One covered meeting her stepfather when she was four years old, where to my memory, she totally nailed the viewpoint from that age. Another, the frank depiction of her horrific experience in the hospital after surgery, felt like a public service announcement wrapped in a horror story. “None of us thinks the complication rate applies to us.”These essays are culled from Mantel’s semi-regular contributions to the London Review of Books over a period of many years. Most are based on books she’s reviewing, chosen because they’re of interest to her for one reason or another. The story of a medium prosecuted for being a witch—in the 1940s—greatly interests Mantel, and so interested me, especially as it turns into an indictment of the type of people (gender- and class-wise) deemed guilty.