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Interview

Hilary Mantel

talks to Debbie Taylor

From Issue 30 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2006

Hilary Mantel’s emails to me always begin ‘Dumela’, which is ‘Hello’ in Setswana. Twenty-odd years ago – unbeknownst to one another – we both moved to Botswana. There, landlocked in the parched centre of Africa, we embarked on our separate writing careers, tapping away on manual typewriters at dawn, before the heat set in.

We never met; she lived in a village near the border with South Africa; I was further inland, towards the Kalahari Desert. But for both of us the dislocation was an opportunity to devote serious time to a craft we’d never attempted before.

Mantel was working on a hugely ambitious historical novel about three key players in the French Revolution. She’d started it almost unconciously, back in the UK, reading obsessively on the subject and taking copious notes. ‘After a while,’ she remembers, ‘I started wondering why I was taking all these notes. Then I realised it was going to be a book.’

A Place Of Greater Safety was nearly 350,000 words long – four times the usual novel length – and took six years to write. She refers to it now as ‘my Brechtian novel’, with a gutteral rolling of the ‘r’ that recalls her working-class Derbyshire background. The book displayed many trademark Mantel characteristics: elegant writing style, satirical authorial voice – and a passionate engagement with the politics of power.

I visit her lofty penthouse flat in a vast converted Victorian asylum. She’s poised and pillowy, resplendent in a turquoise kaftan; her face is pixyish, her eyes enormous. Her laptop is set up in the corner of an expansive living room. I’m here to talk about Beyond Black – shortlisted for the Orange prize – but she’s bursting with excitement about a new book she’s working on: Wolf Hall, another big historical novel, about Thomas Cromwell and set in the 16th Century. ‘It’s very clean, very pared down,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to reproduce Tudor language, because I hate pastiche, but I don’t want them to use words that they wouldn’t know. And I’m going for simple language and images in the narrative too, so it’s very filmic.’

She started it one day as a kind of holiday from another novel she was writing, which wasn’t going well. Set in Botswana, The Complete Stranger is a lesbian love story (and murder), ‘very claustrophobic, intensely focused; set in a household under threats of all kinds’. Though she was only on chapter one, it was already giving her bad dreams. ‘I have nightmares with all my books, but usually in the later stages,’ she explains. ‘Writing really beats me up, but I think an element of fear is necessary to produce good work.’

Fear has always flavoured Mantel’s experiences. In her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, she gave us a rare insight into her development as a writer. The book chronicles a childhood blighted by unseen presences, mysterious illnesses and lies. When she was six the family moved to a haunted house, replete with ghostly figures and sudden drops in temperature, where objects behaved in odd ways. ‘Even the grown ups were afraid – and that is terrifying for a child.’

Added to little Hilary’s paranormal dread was the more tangible terror that her mother was going to abandon her. She’d lie awake at night, afraid of falling asleep then waking to find her mother gone. It turned out that Mrs Mantel had had a lover throughout this period, a fact her wide-eyed and watchful daughter must have picked up on unconsciously. ‘I’d known since I was four that things weren’t right between my parents,’ she tells me. ‘At some level you always know when you’re being lied to.’

Dating from this childhood insecurity was the ill health that would blight her entire life. Mantel was a sickly child – one doctor nicknamed her Little Miss Neverwell – who grew into a young woman plagued by pain in every part of her body ‘except my feet’, including migraines whose neurological symptoms contributed to her being diagnosed as mentally ill. Repeatedly misdiagnosed and mistreated, never taken seriously, she was pumped full of anti-psychotic medication, whose bizarre side effects were ‘the worst thing I have ever experienced’.

"I’ve always been a very modest seller", she says ruefully.

Despite this, she got to university, where she studied law and was swept into student politics on a wave of anger against injustice that animates her still. But the pain just went on getting worse. ‘Pain sliced through me,’ she writes in her memoir. ‘It stole my life; it stole it for ten years and for a double term, and then for ten years more.’ And it put paid to her ambitions to be a barrister, to harness her anger and fierce intelligence, and ‘make a mark on the world’.

What sustained her through this period – working in menial jobs, and later in Botswana – was her writing. Writing offered an alternative path, where her commitment to social justice might still be pursued.

In the end she diagnosed herself, poring over medical tomes in a university library in Botswana. She had endometriosis, in which rogue womb tissue develops in odd places around the body and swells and bleeds, as the womb itself does every month, causing pain, scarring and, left untreated, irreparable damage.

Back in the UK on home leave, she submitted her body to a consultant and her manuscript to an agent and awaited the results. They were devastating – on both counts. Radical surgery was needed, to remove all her reproductive organs and several lengths of intestine – and the book was rejected.

Of the many low points in her young life, this must have been the nadir. ‘I had marriage problems as well,’ she recalls. ‘Everything seemed to fall apart on me. I was just lying in the gutter looking at stars.’

She clung to her writing, though, and never lost faith in her ability as an author. ‘I had the confidence that I could make a novel work. I’d been writing for six years by myself with no reinforcement and I’d overcome so many technical problems completing that first book.'

She returned to Botswana and embarked on a second novel; something shorter and contemporary that would, as she puts it, ‘have fewer things working against it’. Every Day Is Mother’s Day was a black comedy about a chaotic spiritualist, her ostensibly autistic daughter, a neighbouring family, and the shambolic social services of the time. She sent it to agent Bill Hamilton at A M Heath, and this time she struck lucky: the book was accepted for publication. Though she would never be a barrister or a mother, it seemed she would be a novelist after all.

In 1992, seven years and four novels later, A Place Of Greater Safety was published at last. Throughout those seven years, she says, ‘I was plagued by a spate of dreams in which I was a midwife who had let a child die’. When the book finally came out, the dreams stopped.

Today she has nine novels under her belt, along with a slew of essays and reviews, a memoir and a volume of short stories. But though her intelligent, entertaining and mordant writing has won critical plaudits and prizes, commercial success has been slow in coming. ‘I’ve always been a very modest seller’, she says ruefully.

With Beyond Black, this is changing and the novel has already sold well over 65,000. It’s not Mantel’s favourite book, though. ‘I was quite ill in the middle of it. I had thyroid failure and my brain was fraying away day by day. I was working really really hard and getting nowhere, so I developed a sense of failure about it.’

The novel tells the story of professional psychic Alison – big and soft and blousy – and her thin and vinegary assistant Colette. It revisits the world of the paranormal, as the couple tour the psychic fair circuit at tacky theatres and hotels along the M25, and explores Alison’s relationship with her ‘spirit guide’, the cackling, masturbating Maurice and his band of cronies, the undead ghosts of the amoral men who made her life misery as a child.

The paranormal – along with themes of social justice, and fictional reworkings of autobiographical material – is one of Mantel’s three main sources of subject matter. Considering her haunted past, and the inexplicable occurrences that are still a feature of her life, this is not surprising. ‘When we were in Jeddah,’ she says – she lived in Saudi Arabia for four years – ‘and our first home leave was coming up, when I went to pack, the wardrobe doors had been lifted right off their hinges and were standing on the opposite side of the room. My husband thinks it’s something to do with me and I think he’s right. So when I step into Alison’s world I’m not going to a completely strange place.’

"The more available you make yourself to your characters, the more you risk destabilising your own core,"

I read Beyond Black then reread the memoir one after the other, in quick succession. Though utterly different in realisation, they cover similar ground. In both there is a woman to whom inexplicable things happen; in both there is a childhood full of secrets and hauntings; in both, a house move brings about a kind of exorcism. ‘I find I often work through material in two completely different modes. So what is deathly serious in the memoir is treated in comic mode in the novel.’

Do Alison and Colette represent two aspects of Mantel’s personality? ‘Alison is an extreme version of myself; she’s what I would have become if I hadn’t had an education. I would have been entirely at the prey of the irrational.’ And Colette, the organiser, who deals with taxes and invoices? ‘I developed a Colette side to survive.’

But identifying this closely with one’s fictional characters carries a price. ‘The more available you make yourself to your characters, the more you risk destabilising your own core,’ says Mantel. ‘Sometimes I’ll walk around the house thinking “Why am I so cold?” And then I’ll realise that I’ve just killed one of my characters, and they’re cold, so of course I’m cold.’

Indeed, writers are rather like psychics, she suggests. ‘There is a part of you that has to be available day and night to this group of people who keep talking to you, who nobody else can see, but you’re in their service.’ In that sense she’s like Alison? ‘Yes, writing has to steal up on you. And that’s what people always say about ghosts, that you see them out of the corner of your eye.’

Reading the parts of Beyond Black that are ostensibly from Alison’s point of view is a disturbing experience. The viewpoint wavers about in these scenes, from Alison to Colette, from direct speech to inner thoughts, from real to paranormal perceptions. Whereas the parts that are about Colette are much more stable. Was this an attempt to convey Alison’s weak boundaries?

‘Yes, she’s absolutely permeable,’ says Mantel, ‘but I’m never conscious of point of view when I’m writing. I used to teach at Arvon with Lesley Glaister and she’d do the point of view seminar and I’d do the structure seminar, because she never thought about structure and I never thought about point of view.’

Her identification with the two women in the new Botswana novel may have been heightened, she thinks, because it followed so soon after her long immersion in the world of Alison and Colette in Beyond Black, with its troubling autobiographical echoes. ‘So I thought, “I’ll have a little experiment and I’ll write the first page of the historical novel...” Instant happiness!’ She grins expansively: ‘Normally I’d be very secretive, but in this case I was walking round the world and saying, “Do you want to see my first page?”’

Yet Wolf Hall is every bit as dark as her other work. ‘It’s the most savage piece of writing I’ve ever done,’ she says gleefully, practically rubbing her hands together. ‘My eyes were widening. I am describing something absolutely brutal.’

Her relish for the obscene detail, the ‘ruddy and gelatinous’ fragment, makes one very alert as a reader, unable to relax entirely into the elegant precision of the prose. ‘I always go for the darkest and most disgusting interpretation,’ she admits. ‘It’s my trademark; there is an aesthetic triumph in casting the most disgusting thing in the most beautiful language.’ But this, too, has its down side. ‘You give yourself a round of applause, but at some level you’re feeling that distress too, and a couple of days later it impacts on your mood.’

‘My writing self would like to continue with the historical novel,’ she says. ‘But it will take at least another three years to complete. So my commercial self says, “Can you afford to wait another three or four years before you have another novel out there?” I’ve already written 70,000 words, which is about the length of the Botswana novel, so theoretically I could have finished that book by now. So I have to make a decision...’ It seems to me the decision has already been made.

HILARY MANTEL was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She has written nine novels, a memoir and a volume of short stories. She was awarded a CBE for ‘services to literature’ in the Queen’s birthday honours list in June 2006.

My first memory

‘I remember a time before I could talk. I remember listening, and thinking, and having an inner voice which spoke, a voice which (creepily) was nothing like a child’s.’

My first writing

‘As a child I would always write things down, but I had the sense that I didn’t know how to make plots. So my first proper piece of writing was when I launched myself into my big novel. But the first thing I had published was a short story. I was in my bungalow in Botswana and it was St Patrick’s day and I sat down and wrote ‘It was St Patrick’s day’, and three hours later I’d written a complete short story. It’s the best short story I’ve ever written, where the last sentence turns back and illuminates the whole thing. I’ve never been able to do that since.’

Thanks to…

‘My mother, I suppose, for getting me a decent education. It was a typical girls’ school, much better for arts than sciences, but it got me thinking and it got me out of working class childhood.’

The first book that affected me

‘Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson, because it was about a boy seeking his fortune and for years I wanted to be a boy. I still love its narrative drive and cinematic quality.’

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*30 The Mantel Method

• Become a magpie. Collect anything that attracts you: images, phrases, little glimpses, footnotes from books... Cut them out if you can, record them on blank postcards, scribble them in a notebook.
• At some point you will discover some titbit that feels like the seed of a new novel. Tantalisingly, this will occur while you are in the middle of a completely different novel.
• Test the seed for suitability. Is it macabre? Is it potentially amusing? Is it concerned in some way with social justice? If it passes muster, go to the library and spend a day reading around the subject to explore the scope of the topic. If it still excites you, set it aside to germinate.
• As it develops in your unconscious, relevant information, conversations, people will start to come to you, uncannily, as though you are a magnet. At the library, books you didn’t know you needed will appear in your hand.
• By now the characters will have begun to form in your mind. Be sure to choose highly sophisticated people, or highly inarticulate ones, as they are more fun to write.
• Start developing snatches of dialogue (you adore writing dialogue) and unconnected scenes. Increasingly, the information you are collecting will be written down as if it’s already part of the book.
• As the information accumulates, develop a filing system. Tear pages from your notebooks and stick them on the wall, or in ring binders, or in a box. But beware of putting anything in order; the information must stay as fluid as possible.
• Begin building your written fragments into complete scenes and stitching them together.
• Avoid working to a set plot; it will make your writing feel mechanical. Just fix on the feeling you want to leave your reader with and work with that goal always in mind. Though it will fill you with anxiety, you must work with the maximum uncertainty you can tolerate. (If possible, choose a historical topic, where at least some of the outcomes are set in stone.)
• Cultivate a kind of vagueness about the novel, to allow your unconscious to set up connections and juxtapositions. Combine this with a surgical attention to the minutiae of each paragraph.
• As the novel grows, it must take over your life. Get up in the middle of the night to work on it, then go back to sleep and dream about it. Because your material is strong and macabre, and linked with your own experiences, inevitably you will start having nightmares. Take heart! These are a necessary part of the process, and signal that the book is going well.
• Press on, refining every paragraph, paring away extraneous matter, positioning every semicolon, until the manuscript is ready for submission.

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