AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE

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The Saudi Arabian city provided the setting for her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, and drew on her time being posted there with her husband, Gerald McEwan, a geologist she met at the University of Sheffield in the 1970s.

The Long QT” is a cautionary tale about adultery, the glittering details exquisite: “A tiny chime hung in the air, as the glasses shivered in her fingers. It is Hunter who is the monster, able to live only among dead things, his narrative given in a hungry present tense. From the protocols of limited socialising with other wives to the habits of the religious police and the brewing method for Jeddah gin (potatoes and citrus fruit, plus water, sugar and a bit of yeast), you can sense the first-hand knowledge. A chance discovery of a news article on a former schoolmate, Julia Lipcott, triggers a flood of memories for Carmel McBain, who reflects back on her experiences at school and university, and her relationships with Julia and another contemporary, Karina. In the years that followed, and in a manner that must have worried publishers and agents, she seemed to want to try something new with each succeeding novel.

The interleaved stories of Hunter and his Giant tell us of the horror, rather than the wonder, of life. I have only read a couple of Mantel’s novels — Eight Mon ths on Ghazzah Street and Beyond Black — as well as her extraordinary memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and enjoyed them all. Each of her novels is a new world, freshly imagined in a special language, but in every one the twists of human desire and fear are exactly charted. But other physical responses, such as a slowed heart rate and relaxed muscles, indicate other emotions such as peacefulness and relaxation. Away from their mothers - their instructive feminine influences - for the first time, the girls navigate their way through this world of issues - from boyfriends to religion, fashion to food - alone.

Others may elect not to consider any of this at all, and simply to enjoy Hilary Mantel’s smart, astringent and marvelously upsetting fiction”. Mantel’s writing is free from literary flourishes, but she has an uncanny eye for detail — the “angry-looking women” in the cotton town of her childhood wear “shoes like boats”; the factory walls are “plum-coloured brick, stained black from the smoke and daily rain”; and thin girls at university “blow up like party balloons”.The two both live in the same row of houses and walk to school every day together, but never become close. When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties.

Indeed, it’s Carmel’s mother who pushes her daughter into a shaky friendship with Karina as a child; a friendship that will prove destructive. Ralph is a “professional Christian”, but the novel tests any Christian faith in human goodness well past breaking point. The protagonist of Eight Months on Ghazzah Street courts danger by not behaving enough like some supercilious expat. A couple of years earlier Mantel had published a huge historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, that now looks like invaluable groundwork for her Thomas Cromwell books, but at the time seemed out of the path of her other fiction.

Unlike them, A Place of Greater Safety has an omniscient narrator, willing to inform us of facts and motivations wherever necessary. Those who know any of Mantel’s backlist will recognise some of her hallmarks: the mix of banality and weirdness; the pitiless black humour (suttee, of course being the ritual of a widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre); the sardonic use of language. She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, graduated from Sheffield University with a Bachelor of Jurisprudence, and then published her first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, in 1985 when she was 33 years old. In a 2013 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mantel stated: "I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people. The award will undoubtedly raise expectations for the trilogy's culmination, and Mantell has admitted The Mirror and the Light, which will chronicle Cromwell's downfall, would be a "complex" and "complicated" book.

There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood. Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, published in 1988, was based on her experience of living in Saudi Arabia for four years while her husband, Gerald, worked as a geologist. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as a Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973.Rational explanations are eschewed for ghostly ones – furniture is most likely rearranged by a sleepwalker – but the threatening atmosphere in Mantel’s world suggests more sinister forces at work. Gavin, the disappointing husband whom Colette has left, comes back to her years later, humbled and adoring: “She looked at him; his head hanging like some dog that’s been out in the rain. The novel brilliantly lets the sense of suppressed desperation and anger build up in sinister quietness, but also disturbs by leaving its several mysteries unexplained. She delivered five 2017 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio Four, talking about the theme of historical fiction.