A Place of Greater Safety

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Maybe this is Mantel's rejection of the way modern historical fiction is so often chick-lit in fancy dress, all breathless gasps and thumping hearts? He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, "You prick. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall. The College stood on the rue Saint-Jacques, cut off from the city by high solid walls and iron gates. It was not the custom to heat the place, unless ice formed on the holy water in the chapel font; so in winter it was usual to go out early to harvest some icicles and drop them in, and hope that the principal would stretch a point.

In the end A Place of Greater Safety felt intellectual satisfying, but left me feeling that most of the characters were mythologicalized, larger than life superbeings, who always have witty words ready for any situation. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. She has no need to invent subplots of horror: the horror is all around, part of the everyday landscape, and the reader lives through it along with her characters.

She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady's hand to Augustin's cradle, rocking, rocking. Maximilien's tone was very respectful, the principal thought; he offers a due deference to the opinions of others, then takes no notice of them at all.

As I said, at first he believes in a constitutional monarchy, as did many others, but Louis XVI’s veto of important legislation and, most of all, his attempt to flee the country, changes Robespierre’s mind. In over 800 pages Mantel brilliantly describes the lives, from childhood, of three main characters of the French Revolution : Danton, Camille and Robespierre - how they meet in adulthood, become acquainted [and friends] and how their politics bring them together [and apart] in the turmoil of events of1789 and beyond. Mantel suggests that they forced the two of them into sexual relations so that Eléonore would become pregnant and Robespierre would marry her. In the swells of the revolution, the men taste the addictive delights of power, but in the process unleash the darker side of the Revolution’s ideals and experience the horror that follows. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost , and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades.

He thought that the only purpose of the project was to excuse his father from conversing with his mother in the evenings. The re-interpretation is her scrupulous avoidance of a well-ploughed furrow, that of portraying Danton as the bull-like masculine sensualist and Robespierre as the ascetic 'feminine' incorruptible, in opposition to each other virtually from the start. The priests said he came with it, and Jean-Nicolas said he assuredly did not leave home with it; and it was concluded that Camille's fluency of speech lay discarded along the coach route, like a valise or a pair of gloves that has gone astray.