On and off I have been reading Mantel. I say on and off not because 800 pages is a daunting task, not because the zest for Mantel has evaporated; my problem is other things are more urgent. I just do not have all the time in the world. This did not happen with the first two books of the series. I happily plunged into the turmoil of the Tudor regime and found that my guide knew her way round the landscape and into Tudor minds in a thoroughly beguiling way. Mantel became a compulsion; other things became less urgent.
Now, I am finding her just as beguiling. The problem is she’s more so. There are so many nooks and dells as I find myself turning aside from the main narrative. It reminds me of reading Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, an epic with mouth-watering pageantry and gorgeous sideshows presented in mellifluous verse as though the writer’s aim is to distract the reader rather than elevate chivalry and virtue. Mantel, in other words, is not alone in her excellences and snares.
I settle back in expectation as I am lured into the setting of Tudor drama, the procedure dictating an amputation, the sophisticated menu, the art of Holbein, the practice of garden design. The writer is so much at home in the era she has adopted as her own that her novels have all the charm, all the convenience, of foreign travel without the business of checking in, collecting documents and necessary chores that make travel less enjoyable.
In other words Mantel gives us so much; in fact she gives us more than enough. We happily lap up the extensive vintage she has garnered. ‘Here is God’s plenty,’ we find ourselves saying. Her achievement is stunning – but nobody wished it longer, as Johnson said about ‘Paradise Lost’ That is a squib of a caveat when we appreciate the scale of Mantel’s work.
The essence of the matter is to be introduced to the various levels at which the story operates. There is the plain meaning of Cromwell’s words. Then there is the unspoken truth that underlies them and remains concealed from his audience. There is the customary courtliness that masks what is often an ugly reservation in the mind of the King’s fixer. There is always the void between appearance and reality.
We gain a great deal from Mantel: about human nature, about clashing loyalties, about dynastic marriage, about ‘commodity’, to use Shakespeare’s word for the pressures that turn us aside from our duty. At our best we see darkly 1 Corinthians 13.12) but that is better than not seeing at all.
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