Hilary Mantel's sudden death in 2022 at the age of 70 shocked the literary world and fans of her Wolf Hall Trilogy, which was a publishing phenomenon. In this wide-ranging conversation recorded in Toronto in 1997, Mantel's best-known works were yet to come and as Randy Boyagoda notes in the introduction, you as a listener wish you could reach in and tell her that her peak as a writer still lay in the future. With an excellent host at the helm, Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, this lovely conversation gives a real sense of what shaped Hilary Mantel's approach to writing, her unique and complex characters and the thoughtful ways she blends research with good old-fashioned storytelling.
This audio recording of Hilary Mantel in conversation with Rosemary Sullivan was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1997. It is used with the kind permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Thanks to TIFA for allowing us access to their archives for this series. Find out more about the Festival and its annual festival along with many other activities at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes featuring some of the 20th century's most beloved writers, including Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and more.
Works by Hilary Mantel in Toronto Public Library's collection:
An Experiment in Love (print edition) (ebook)
Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book One) (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book Two) (print edition, ebook, audiobook)
The Mirror and the Light (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book Three) (print edition) ebook) (audiobook)
A Change of Climate (print edition) (ebook)
Vacant Possession (print edition) (ebook)
A Place of Greater Safety (print edition) (ebook)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (print edition)
Other Related Books or Materials in our collections:
The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Stalin's Daughter : the Extraordinary and Tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
(print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Wolf Hall - Masterpiece Theatre's 2015 movie adaptation (DVD)
About the Host
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Hilary Mantel tells us about all that she did, as a young woman and as a beginning writer, to be more than she was expected to be. And this is all well before she became much more than she, or anyone else, ever expected her to be.
Hilary Mantel teaser: In my generation, they weren't trying to get us all to go away and become nuns, they were trying to get us to be uhh good Catholic mothers and pursue social work and teaching and those kind of professions. And I say in the book that it wasn't a school that trained life's officers, it was one that trained life's foolish volunteers.
RANDY: It’s important, and delightful, to know that the interview you’re about to hear, with Hilary Mantel, takes place at what she thought of as, well, more or less, the height of her career. No, this interview didn’t take place in 2009, when she published Wolf Hall, or in 2012, when she published Bring Up the Bodies, or in 2020, when, with The Mirror and the Light, she completed the most remarkable trilogy of historical novels in contemporary fiction, focused on the rise and rise and rise, and fall, of sixteenth-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell. No. This interview took place in 1997, as part of a tour Mantel was on, at the time, in support of her novel An Experiment in Love, her seventh, an autobiographical novel of sorts about the promise and peril of being an academically ambitious woman socially set apart from friends and classmates at all levels of school. In conversation with the expert biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, Mantel is plain-spoken and penetrating about her own experiences of Catholic schooling in a featureless village outside Manchester, England, and how these unexpectedly helped her become the writer she became. I emphasize unexpectedly because this is one of the great things about Hilary Mantel’s work, particularly her historical fiction: you always, always already know how things are going to end, and yet you’re amazed by how she gets you there because of what she brings to your attention along the way, by what she describes in this interview, as her fascination with “inner workings” when it comes to religion, politics, gender, power.
As much is the case for a literary feminist critique of a domestic-focused religiously-framed education in a patriarchal system: she’s still taken with the inner workings of that system, and finds what benefits her within it before breaking with it to pursue a much more expansive life. This involves rejecting a possible career in the law, and then a marriage that led to extended international travel and, of course, writing fiction. And this is where it's important, and delightful, to have that sense of knowing this interview takes place eleven years before the publication of Wolf Hall, the novel that made her a writer of global renown. Mantel is honest about the uneven shape of her career; Rosemary Sullivan laments her books aren’t better known; but Mantel appears to be at peace with it, and grateful she had the time and space and career standing to pursue what she thought of, then, as what would be her major work, nearly two decades in the making, A Place of Greater Safety, a massive novel set during the French Revolution. I don’t know about you, but I rarely say something out loud while listening to a recorded interview. This time, I did: I couldn’t help but say “You have no idea! You have no idea!” if you think that’s going to be your major work, Hilary Mantel. But we have the benefit of knowing history, even more so than she did, if only about her own work at this moment in what was then an impressive career and would be, thereafter, a remarkable one.
****
Rosemary Sullivan: First, I wanted to say that you were born in what you describe as the village of Hadfield, sounds very Jane Austenish. And that, you've described this as a place where borders meet, distinct regional identities run up against each other. When we think of England, we think of perhaps class and Yorkshire, London, but not that notion of intense regional identities. That formed you as a writer?
Hilary Mantel: Well, Jane Austen certainly wouldn't have recognized Hadfield. It's a very bleak, treeless village on the edge of the moorland, a textile village about 14 miles from Manchester, so on the edge of industrial sprawl, and yet with nothing beyond it but reservoirs and very bleak moorland. And it's a point where four counties meet. In my mother's day, they used to go down to the bridge at the end of the village and the Derbyshire children would throw stones at the Cheshire children, so it was a state of regional warfare, really. It was also a sectarian village. There was a large Irish community that had come in a generation ago. The first thing you ever knew about people was whether they were a Protestant or a Catholic, even when you were quite a small child. And yes, I think that that, being born there, identifying myself, as I do very much, as a northwestern writer has been quite important.
RS: And you also identify your roots, at least, as through both the English side and the Irish side of your mother?
HM: I think so, because when I was a very small child we lived, as it were, in an Irish family, in an Irish community. By the time I was 6 or 7, my great aunts and great uncles were beginning to die off. And it's very strange that I grew up with a strong sense of being Irish, but my brothers who were five and six years younger have no sense of it at all. And it's almost as if I belong to a different generation of the family.
RS: And that Catholic background, I have to say I have a Catholic upbringing, too. I wondered if there was a little bit of revenge in your portrait, in An Experiment in Love, of that Catholic girl, school environment?
HM: Well, I strayed away at the age of 12. I'm very grateful, however, that I did have a Catholic upbringing, in a twisted sort of way. Because I think that, what it does mean is that from the age of about 4 onwards, you're realizing that there is more to the world than what you literally see and touch. You have a sense of metaphysics infused into you at nursery level. And I think that's very valuable for a writer to know that things are both literal and metaphorical.
RS: That's lovely.
HM: Also, you know, that terrible habit that's instilled into you of daily examination of conscience [laughter], I don't know whether it is any more, but it certainly was then. Yes, it makes you examine your own motives and later other people's motives, which I think, again, is valuable training for a writer. I went to a hideous Catholic primary school, the same school as my mother and my grandmother, and I learned equally little and I was persecuted by nuns who were probably the same ones. [laughter]
HM: I wrote about this in my book Fludd, which is set in a fictitious village suspiciously like the one in which I grew up. And then I wrote about my convent schooling, An Experiment in Love. Actually, I did enjoy being there. Probably I was the only girl in the class who did, because it had removed me into another world. When I was 11 years old my mother remarried. We moved only eight miles away, but it might as well have been to another world.
HM: We joined the middle classes. I went to this rather posh convent, where at first I was completely out of my depth and completely at sea and everybody laughed at my accent and so on. Well, one gets over that. And then I saw that I'd actually been handed a very good chance to get on to get into university, and there was prospect of escape. So I remain grateful to my school. And I think, I do make a point of saying that it wasn't like the convent schools that are described in books. In An Experiment in Love, I try to avoid the clichés or demolish them, and I try to get at what were really the inner workings of it, which are not often quite what people think.
RS: No, I agree with you that... I always called it a metaphysical appetite that's awakened in you as a child. But there is that black sinister side, the nuns in the black and so on.
HM: Yes.
RS: But you were... When you went to the university, you studied law?
HM: That's right. Yes.
RS: What a choice.
HM: Well, again, seemed to me a way out. It was over-optimistic on my part, because it wasn't until I was actually at university that the economic realities of it were borne in upon me, and certainly in the system we had then. If you wanted to be a barrister, which I did, you would have to fund yourself after university through a couple of years of pupillage and training. You would then earn next to nothing. So you were dependent on parental and family backup, which I wasn't in a position to have. So I pretty quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to do that. Having said that... Again, it's something I don't regret, because I think it gave me a kind of rather different outlook from most writers. It's a rather unorthodox background.
HM: And of course, what I was chiefly interested in those days was politics. I suppose I saw law as a way into politics. What I ended up doing was writing a book about the French Revolution, about a bunch of lawyers who become politicians. [chuckle]
[laughter]
RS: Did you think you were going to be the Prime Minister or something?
HM: Oh, probably, yes.
[laughter]
RS: That was an ambition I had. It's something to do with that Catholic background. You give it up pretty quickly. You said, at the age of 22 you decided to... You had married and you decided you would become a full-time writer. Now, that's actually awfully clearheaded and young... To be that clearheaded at a young age about being a writer is quite wonderful.
HM: Well, of course I wasn't in a position to give up work and do that, but what I did decide to do was commit myself to a book. And I spent, for the next however many years, all evenings, all weekends, virtually all my spare time went into it, because I was researching the book that would become A Place of Greater Safety, which is my huge novel about the French Revolution.
RS: And your favourite.
HM: Yes, it is my favourite, I suspect because in a way I'm the only one who knows the blood, sweat, and tears of that book. You hope that the effort isn't there for the readers to see and they only get the top surface. But I know how much of my life went into it, and really, I didn't have an ambition to be a writer. I just had an ambition to write that book. And I think the reason I wanted to write it was because I wanted to read it.
[laughter]
RS: But you studied law. You worked as a social worker at some point, didn't you?
HM: I did, yes, after university.
RS: And yet, it never occurred to you to write a historical text. This was going to be a fictional account of the French Revolution, which is quite... It seems to be a kind of confidence that's impressive.
HM: Well, I think maybe there was a lot of uncertainty, spiced with a little bit of arrogance, which I do really truly think writers need.
RS: You do.
HM: There is a stage where nobody believes in you but you, and I think you have to feel powerfully driven. Set against that, I knew that I was undertaking a big project. I knew that it would be years before it came to fruition, and there is a sort of advantage in not having time limits set except by yourself. Also, when you're 22, you don't have much sense of urgency, or at least I didn't. I thought I can take as long as it takes. If I were now to say to my publisher, my next book will be along in five to seven years, they would not be very pleased. So it was my one chance to do a book on that scale, which was also a very big research project. And I frankly don't think I would have the stamina to do it now.
[laughter]
RS: No, you run out of that kind of stamina. Well, you didn't publish your first book until you were 33...
HM: That's right.
RS: It feels like an 11-year apprenticeship. Was it hard to get it published?
HM: I didn't hawk my work around. I was, I suppose, serving an apprenticeship to myself. And a lot of the time that I was actually writing A Place of Greater Safety, I was in Botswana living in very remote circumstances, and there wasn't this temptation, really, to want to see your name in print. You were so cut off from that world. In 1978, just as a... I sat down and wrote a short story in three hours. Very strange, because I'm not good at short stories, and I thought, well, that's the best I can do. And I packed it off and sent it to Punch, the humour magazine, which published fiction at that time. They took it, it was a great boost. And I lived on that for a long time, knowing that, right, I had some claim, however small, to be a writer.
RS: And when you were ready?
HM: Once I was ready to publish, it wasn't A Place of Greater Safety. That manuscript had various accidents, I myself had various accidents. I had a serious illness. I changed countries, ended up in Saudi Arabia. And for various reasons, I decided to put it aside and start afresh. So I wrote Every Day is Mother's Day, my first published book. And once it was ready, things went remarkably quickly. I more or less walked in off the street to an agent's office, we clicked, and couple of months later I had a publisher. So I think it was a case of biding your time, because I feel pretty confident with Every Day is Mother's Day, that, again, okay, this is the best I can do, now, if this isn't going to work, I'd better think of some other trade.
HM: And I think I had quite a... I was beginning to think, now, before I'm 35, I must know whether this is going to be my life or not. I suppose whilst my husband and I were abroad, it was kind of out of time. But I knew that one day we'd go back to UK and I would have to make some kind of serious career. And fortunately, things worked for me and it turned out that I could make a career as a full-time writer.
RS: I should explain to the fireplace that between 1977 and 1982, Hilary Mantel lived in Botswana. Her husband was a geologist, and that was the reason you went there?
HM: That's right, yes.
RS: And then from '82 to '86, you lived in Saudi Arabia.
HM: That's right. Yes.
RS: So from African to Arab culture, what a transition. That was, what? Nine years as an expatriate?
HM: That's right, yes.
RS: It must have been extraordinary being there, but it also must have been extraordinary re-inserting yourself into British culture. You must have seen England differently.
HM: Yes. In our Botswana days, we'd only been home once in the five years. In Saudi Arabia, it was different because you flew home every summer. And what that did enable me to do, actually, was be involved in British society, but at the same time step back, take a look at it. So when I came to write my second book, Vacant Possession, it was a kind of snapshot of the summer of 1984, which I don't think I could have done if I'd been living in the country with all of the contingencies and the running stories.
RS: You would've be inside it.
HM: There was a date when I came back, and there was a date when I went away and I could look at what was happening between those days and say, "Right, that's the state of the nation." And then, go away back to Jeddah with my material, my newspaper cuttings, and write my novel. So when I was in Botswana, I wrote about the French Revolution. [laughter] When I was in Jeddah, I wrote about England. When I came back to England, I then wrote about Saudi Arabia. Yes.
[laughter]
RS: How does one write about the French Revolution in Botswana? You had all your research done?
HM: Yeah. It was probably just as well that we did go out there because I might have been researching it still.
[laughter]
RS: I was thinking that. I mean, you came back from Saudi Arabia to England, and in England, wrote your book about Saudi Arabia. And then wrote your book about Africa, which had come before. I wonder, do you have all these embryo novels in you and how do you finally allow one rather than the other to surface, or do they just come in sequence?
HM: Well, I'm a very quick writer but a very long, slow thinker. So the novels do tend to go back and back. For instance, the novel that I've just finished and which will be out next year has been in the works for eight years. I think there was a compulsion to do the Saudi Arabian novel as soon as I came back while I had that photographic vividness. After all, I already had the story sorted out, it was clear in my mind. My experience of Africa took a great deal longer to get to grips with. I wrote two tentative short stories about Africa before I dipped my toe in the waters of a novel. They were preparatory exercises, I think.
HM: And when I did write about it, I chose to set the book in places I had been, but at the time when I had not been there. So part of A Change of Climate takes place in an invented township in South Africa, at the beginning of the '60s, at the time when apartheid legislation is setting in place piece by piece. And the family I'm writing about, who are missionaries, live in the midst of this bustling and alive and dangerous township. They are then transferred to Botswana, which was then Bechuanaland, and they live in a very remote settlement on the fringes of the Kalahari. So it was again…I don't think I could have done it if I had not been in those places, but again, it was a research project because I was trying to get the personalities, the politics, the setting, absolutely spot on.
RS: In that book, you start off with a note at the beginning. It's something like, if I can find it here, referring to the fact that cases like the situation that the characters had found themselves in, can be found in the law books of Botswana. I don't want to give away the plot in case some of you haven't read the book. It is just the most astonishing moment of violence that occurs in your invented village. Was it your publisher who insisted there be such a note, were they worried about...
HM: No, I think it was... It came from myself. When I went to Botswana as an ex-lawyer, the first thing I did to try to find out what went on in this country was to sit reading the law reports, and I came across these astonishing stories in the trial records. And I was conscious, though, and I made notes, I brought them back. So the circumstances are a fit. I was conscious, though, that when I'd written the novel that some people are hypersensitive to any suggestion that one might be talking about primitive societies or might be talking about superstition, et cetera.
HM: And I don't give too much away to say that the book involves witchcraft, a very potent, an everyday force in life in Botswana, and one taken almost matter-of-factly in many ways. I was a teacher, one of my favourite pupils, one day his classmates brought him in and said, Justice has been struck dumb. Fine. So until Justice was unstruck dumb... You know, no one had anything to say about this. We just had to take it on board. And this, to some people, you see, what was to me a fact of life seems impossibly exotic and they might think that you had invented it for some purpose of your own, in other words that you had a hidden agenda, and that this was not sober fact.
HM: But in fact, increasingly, I'm sorry to say, in the last few years in the South African newspapers, you are getting reports of the kind of case I describe, and it was just really a word to the wise. In fact, I had only one letter suggesting that such cases were always made up by Europeans.
RS: Well, in fact, I noticed that you walked perhaps only once into the climate of political correctness. There was a reference in the New York Times Book Review to this issue of whether the readers should find themselves reexamining their own ideas about the writer's rights or obligation to render politically uncomfortable truths. You know that as a writer, what happened in that case that you're describing in the novel, because it's true you have a right to speak about it. To me...
HM: I think so.
RS: To me, in the novel, what shook me to my foundations, frankly, in that novel was the portrait of your main character. Ralph is a missionary as you describe him, or a pseudo missionary, not a real missionary, but he has to discover, and it takes most of his lifetime, that when he thinks he has a capacity for good, and yet what he is doing is harming those he most loves.
HM: Yes.
RS: And it's his naivete or what you call his spiritual competitiveness that he has to be better than other people.
HM: Yes.
RS: That leads to the disaster. And it's to me the moral centre of, if you... It's not criticism, but of focus in the book, not what happens in Botswana in a way.
HM: That's right. I put the emphasis, as Ralph does, after the atrocious act takes place on the choice that led to it. There are several points in Ralph's life where he has to make choices, and he always makes them, as he thinks for the good. And in this case, he feels that the choice has disastrously backfired and wrecked his family. And Ralph, I think he's a complex character, because right at the beginning of his life, or rather when he's a boy, he's 17, he is emotionally blackmailed by his parents and he makes a choice which is in favour, really, of his sister, Emma, rather than himself. He sacrifices himself for his sister's interests. And there is a point then at which Ralph stops, stops growing. I had a lot of trouble with him as a character.
RS: You pulled him off beautifully. [chuckle]
HM: Well, it's interesting, because I always had this sense of something arrested in him. And I didn't quite know what I'd done. And actually, it was a psychotherapist who pointed out to me that this is the vital point for Ralph, the choice at 17, which in a way, warps his power to make decisions thereafter. And I found that a very interesting viewpoint. But I think of all the characters I've tried to come to grips with, I have found him the most ambivalent, the most paradoxical.
RS: I like your... Not that this is... I like your women better than your men, and not as characters, but as people. [chuckle] The women seem to have a capacity for truthfulness, while the men are, like Ralph, are caught up in the persona of family, family men, or whatever.
HM: Yes. I think in several of my books, there are... And I think particularly this might apply to my novel about the French Revolution. The men have defined themselves, they're heroes. And it is left really to the women to say, "Well, wait a minute, what about last week before you were a hero?"
[laughter]
HM: Don't I seem to remember that?
RS: And to clean up their messes all the time.
HM: Yeah. Yes. And, yes. And they're running on their tracks. They're on their rails.
RS: Yeah.
HM: The women have perhaps a more complex perspective.
RS: We've got... I'd like to talk about An Experiment in Love, and if we have time perhaps go back to your Saudi Arabian novel. The title. I know there's a moment in the novel when the narrator says that she's the experiment in love. People watch her because they know she's going to make such mistakes. Clever people watch her, she'll make the mistakes and they won't have to. But it's a fascinating title. And I don't quite get it, I have to say, An Experiment in Love.
HM: Well, I think that the book's about several kinds of love. It's about mother love, sexual love, and the love, the supportive, and sometimes destructive love that can exist between women. Carmel is in some ways an experiment, as far as her mother's concerned.
RS: She is, yes.
HM: Because Carmel is... She's a working class girl. She's the only child of quite a poor family. Her mother's a cleaning woman, she's got no education, she puts the weight of her expectations on Carmel, who has to go out and fulfill all her ambitions. But Carmel is of a different generation and a different personality set up. So I think she often feels that she is being experimented upon in that sense.
RS: I see.
HM: Then all the girls in the hall of residence where she lives, in her dormitory, they are involved in sexual experiments all the time. And the great experiment is finding out what kind of a woman it is possible to be and what they will become. You know what Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." And I think that is the grand experiment of one's life that Carmel is undertaking how and in what circumstances and whom can she love.
RS: I see.
HM: And also, how can she accept love without being destroyed by it.
RS: You chose to write the novel in the first person.
HM: Yes.
RS: Which is always such a fascinating choice for a writer. Suddenly, the reader becomes you. You intimately pull them into the novel. You get... We get inside her head when she... So she gets to think... Do lovely riffs on memory and... But did it change your relationship with her? Is she different for you because you've written her in the first person, and was she to be written in the third?
HM: Yes, I think so. It is the first sustained piece of writing I've done in the first person. I found a lovely freedom in it, but I have to say that those questions about voice and perspective, point of view, they're never questions that I consciously work out.
RS: No, no.
HM: Those are decisions that I have made, I think, almost unconsciously before I begin to write, and it's very difficult for me to imagine that the novel could have been at all separated from the first person narrator.
RS: I know myself when I'm writing, if you can't figure out how to submit to your... I write poetry... To your image or to your obsession, artifice always gets in the way, but when you submit and allow the, I don't know, intuitive logic of the... Though logic isn't the right word. The intuitive energy of the image, you end up surprising yourself. I think it's sometimes overdone, this idea of writing is inspiration. It comes... But there is a process of... If you can let go...
HM: Yes, yes. And I feel that every package of material, every set of subject matter, for me, it brings its own style with it as part of the package.
RS: Integral, too.
HM: Yeah, yeah.
RS: It's not something separate. Yeah.
HM: Yes, and that's why I think, for instance, A Change of Climate is... It's very much a traditional 19th century novel, which seemed to suit the subject matter. Other texts are much more fractured and quite different in feel.
RS: And in Eight Months on Ghazzah, you had to use the diary?
HM: Yes.
RS: Because, I mean, how else do you write a novel? For three quarters of the novel, nothing happens. You've got to have...
HM: That's right.
RS: The diary. There was a wonderful phrase in An Experiment in Love, because it is about a young girl going through varieties of schools and ending up at university and so on. And you say, "Men educated women on the male plan, like little chappies with breasts. Women are forced to imitate men and bound not to succeed at it. They would always be inferior to the original model." That has a lot of invective in it.
[laughter]
HM: Yes. So that was what I thought about my school days looking back. I thought, "Well, what actually were they doing?" In my generation, they weren't trying to get us all to go away and become nuns, they were trying to get us to be uhh good Catholic mothers and pursue social work and teaching and those kind of professions. And I say in the book that it wasn't a school that trained life's officers, it was one that trained life's foolish volunteers.
[laughter]
HM: And so there was this model for what a good Catholic girl should become, and yet when you went off at the age of 11 to get your new school uniform and you were put into this thing that was like a man's shirt with a tie, well, you never questioned it, but why were you suddenly cross-dressing? It's...
[laughter]
HM: And playing these oafish muddy teams games. What exactly was going on here? So that was the conclusion I came to. It was a conspiracy.
RS: It was a conspiracy. You're obviously having a wonderful time in this novel.
HM: Yes.
RS: Yes. And a brilliant satire of, well, British culture, class, childhood, and even when adolescence is painful, your writing sparkles. But you are doing a serious riff, if you want, on the mother.
HM: Yes.
RS: And when I try to think of Carmel's mother, I was thinking of that character, Hyacinth, in the British comedy. It's as if you took Hyacinth and made her bitter and argumentative, gave her another dimension. But would that... But you do say at one point about mothers that we lose our understanding of what shaped them. So there's sympathy for that mother, isn't there?
HM: Yes. I think very much so, because she's a very intelligent but thwarted woman. And Carmel is her only way into the future. Carmel's father is a totally ineffectual man who spends his time doing jigsaw puzzles, which get increasingly more and more complex as the years go by so that no one will speak to him or ask him to be involved in anything serious. So her mother is really both mother and father. She's trying to do a tough job, and I do... I try to show her in all her grotesque fury, this 20-year temper tantrum that she enters into when Carmel is about 11, which Carmel never understands, 'cause it can't have been the menopause, not for 20 years. And yet, yes, I have... I see where the woman's coming from. I have a great deal of sympathy for her.
RS: In a way, Carmel, much more vulnerable and so on, but repeats a bit of her mother's error by trying to fit in just like her mother did. It's in a completely different set, but she's caught in something of the same trap.
HM: Yes. I think looking at the historical circumstances in which I set up the character it would've been very difficult for her to do any other.
RS: Yes. Yeah.
HM: But she does find it difficult when she goes away to London to fit in, partly, simply because she's so poor.
RS: Money plays a huge part.
HM: Yes.
RS: As in an Austen novel. [laughter]
HM: Yes.
RS: And it's true, because money does dictate our lives. But there's wonderful stuff you do on virginity. For instance, there's a... Carmel's thinking about the fact that she lost her virginity too late. It would've been a better business career move to have lost it early, because losing it late, you get attached to some useless man. [laughter]
HM: Yes.
RS: But the novel turns dark.
HM: Yes. It does.
RS: There's a little... You do symbols delicately, which is such a relief. But there is a moment when Carmel's father is sitting there playing his jigsaw puzzle and the piece he's missing is Judas's face 'cause he's doing the Last Supper.
HM: Oh, yes. They think it's bit of Judas's rib cage that's missing.
RS: Rib cage.
HM: They have to beat the cushions [laughter], but he never turns up.
RS: Looking for Judas's rib cage.
[laughter]
RS: But there is a sense that in this British world, people will not admit that there can be wickedness. There's a sense in which you conclude that people are dangerous.
HM: Yes.
RS: And the novel turns realistic, I would say, rather than dark. But there's a death in the novel, and it seems to erupt almost logically out of this world of repressed feeling.
HM: Yes.
RS: And the British idea is just never show... I am Canadian, I'm not making a distinction there, but just don't be too dramatic about your life, that's sort of self-serving. Never show any feeling. And out of that repression will come this revenge.
HM: Yes. Because at the end of the novel, the crime takes place. It is a hideous crime. No one knows about it except Carmel and the guilty party. So Carmel has got to carry this knowledge for the rest of her life, always having regard to the slight element of doubt that perhaps things aren't quite as she thinks, but probably knowing in her heart that a murder was committed. Now, I think when Carmel... When the book draws to its close she is as much haunted, as you say, by the resonances of her early childhood, by the world that gave rise to that crime as she is by the crime itself. And again, don't want to give away the plot, but the possible guilty party is the outsider.
RS: The possible guilty party who we won't name, so you'll have to figure out who it is in the novel. She's a grotesque, and yet I admired her in a way, or at least briefly admired her, 'cause she's got a kind of stoicism and feistiness and, you know, when things won't go her way, she just pounds her way through.
HM: Yes.
RS: And I can't hate her.
HM: When Carmel comes to study the feudal system in history, she realizes that Karina's a peasant, doesn't she?
RS: Yes.
HM: That she's... And she's got this sort of awful bitter endurance. And the thing about her is that she never expects things to go right. Her expectations are kept purposely low so that she can't be disappointed. But in the end maybe there is a germ of expectation or worm of expectation, and maybe that's what corrupts her from the inside out.
RS: You say, well, the novel has a lot to do with nourishment.
HM: Yes.
RS: Physical in food, spiritual and you say that people must decide on nourishment. You have to choose nourishment. It's an interesting idea. I mean, there is one of the young, well, Carmel is what we would call anorexic today, but this is a novel that gets the '60s perfectly, I think. She's just a girl who's given up on food.
HM: Yes.
RS: But this idea that we must choose nourishment, is that part of that evolution from being this young girl into a woman?
HM: Yes. Well, what I ask reader to do is think this is not a novel simply about anorexia.
RS: No.
HM: Which is a very complex subject in its own right. It is a novel about appetite and, as you say, about choosing nourishment. Nourishment, taking food, you see, symbolically. Carmel does not like what is provided for her by her mother. She does not like the food that she's provided for her by the hall of residence in which she stays. She wants to provide her own food. She wants to be able to buy it, choose it, pay for it herself. She's not in a position to do this, so the hard stubbornness in her character would rather starve. And the presiding deity of this novel is Mrs. Thatcher, who makes a...
RS: She comes in it.
HM: She makes a cameo appearance at the hall of residence at guests’ night. And at the time I'm writing, Mrs. Thatcher was actually Secretary of State for Education. Now, previously we'd had... For little children, we'd have an issue of free school milk every day. Mrs. Thatcher abolished this concession, and people used to protest and march about with banners, saying, "Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher."
[laughter]
HM: Now, this woman who deprived us of what, if you think, the most... Nourishment on the most symbolic level, was then to go on and to become the mother of our nation. Now, quite what this says about the masochistic tendencies of the British, I leave you to work out.
[laughter]
****
Hilary Mantel was born in 1952 and grew up in the village of Hadfield, outside Manchester. After Catholic schooling and university studies at the London School of Economics and Sheffield, she married a geologist and lived abroad for many years, during which time she began writing fiction. After years of rejections, her first novel was published in 1985, which was followed by several more, earning her a strong critical reputation in Great Britain especially. Her literary career was transformed with the publication of Wolf Hall, in 2009, the first in a trilogy of intensively researched and intensely readable historical novels about the statesman Oliver Cromwell and his dealings with King Henry VIII. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize, as was its successor, Bring Up the Bodies; those books, and the third in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, sold in the millions around the world, providing Mantel with an unexpected experience of fame and influence before her untimely death, following lifelong illnesses and a stroke, in 2022.
The audio recording of Hilary Mantel in conversation with Rosemary Sullivan was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1997. It's used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada'a largest book festival, and its many year round events and programs at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Gregory Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of Season One as well as interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.
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