A dream of organising my ignorance

Yesterday morning, disturbing dreams propelled me out of the sleep into the news that Hilary Mantel had died.

My first reaction was a self-involved gut reaction:  Oh no!  No more books!

Social media was full of tributes, including this one on Twitter:

Evidence is always partial.  Facts are not truth, though they are part of it -- information is not knowledge.  And history is not the past -- it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.  It's the record of what's left on the record.  It's the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down.  It's what's left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it -- a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.  It is no more "the past" than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.  It's the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them.  It's no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

It was followed by "RIP Hilary Mantel".

Of course, no provenance given, and by the next morning, the person posting the tweet had, for whatever reason, removed the tweet. However I'm a family historian and this quote called to me as such, plus, my family history research has made me reasonably good at ferreting things out.

It's from Mantel's first BBC Reith Lecture.  It's long (because it's a lecture), but really worth following the link to read.

Mantel was discussing the historical novel versus "legitimate history".  She's been criticized (usually by male historians) of not being accurate, which is a strange charge to level at a novelist.  I don't recall Robert Graves being raked over the coals for I Claudius, nor Arthur Miller for The Crucible, nor Lin Manuel Miranda for Hamilton.  All three works take liberties with what is felt to have actually happened - and have won awards, despite this.

A family historian also wrestles with what Mantel calls our desperation "for the truth, and sometimes for a comforting illusion" - particularly with family members who, I often find, are only interested if the work I do confirms a family myth, and quickly drop the subject if it disproves it.

Mantel also speaks of coming from "a long line of nobodies" (something I've never believed of anyone). In the next few paragraphs, she demonstrates exactly the opposite, as she pieces together the life of one of her great grandmothers.  "Even nobodies can do this," she says self-deprecatingly with a strong whiff of disingenuousness.

So, no more books.  Or intriguing lectures.  If she had not written stuff down, we wouldn't have even that.

 

I'm determined to seek out more of what she left behind.

Quick update:  This morning, someone put the same quote up on Twitter, and someone else provided the audio link to the original lecture, which includes Mantel's other Reith lectures!  I may be a bit occupied this afternoon...

Evil comes in increments

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had to wait about seven months in the library holds queue for this, and when I finally got my sticky fingers on it (which I wiped off, because it was a library loan), I was at first anxious because this audiobook version has a different reader and part of the reason I'd enjoyed Wolf Hall so much was because of the performance of Simon Slater.  I needn't have worried; Simon Vance is every bit as talented as the other Simon.

This second part of the trilogy about the controversial life and career of Thomas Cromwell covers a much shorter period of time than Wolf Hall -- the brief period that Anne Boleyn was the official consort of Henry VIII -- while being about the same number of pages.  I trust you know what happened to her. This has the effect of intensifying the narrative.

I was looking forward to discovering how Hilary Mantel, who portrayed Thomas Cromwell in a sympathetic light in the previous book (the story is from his viewpoint, after all) would transform this chief minister of the king from a fairly decent man into someone who could send a woman to the scaffold, knowing full well that the charges against her were fabricated.  Anne Boleyn is not shown in a flattering light, but being a bit of a cow shouldn't be a death sentence. The answer comes in increments, as most evil things do.  In Bring Up the Bodies (a sinister title, but actually a legal expression), Cromwell has no grand plan to bring about Anne's death, but one unfortunate statement after another gradually seals the queen's fate.

I particularly enjoyed the imagery in this novel, from the eerie descriptions of Cromwell's hunting hawks (named after his dead wife and daughters) which open this part of the story to the description of the doomed queen's reflection in the Thames as she is led out to the boat that will take her to the Tower of London.

It will be a long wait for the third part of the trilogy -- Mantel is still writing it, and then there will be many holds ahead of me at the library.  Judging from what has come before, the wait will be worth it.



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