Rosy-cheeked and breathless from a cycle ride down West Street, I’m told when I arrive that Hilary Mantel is in the ‘library’.
Two flights of stairs and a couple of the Leopold’s labyrinthine passages later, I find Mantel, Booker Prize winner and best-selling novelist waiting patiently at a table, ready to begin.
The strange underground room we’re in, so-named presumably not for its abundance of books, was chosen by Mantel because “there’s pipe music playing upstairs; I thought it’d be quieter down here”.
The six hundred and fifty page tome set in Henry VIII’s court and centring on the personal life of a certain Thomas Cromwell has just won the Man Booker Prize, and the hearts of the judges with it.
Wolf Hall has garnered praise from every quarter. Chairman of the judges James Naughtie (of Radio 4 fame) called Wolf Hall “an extraordinary piece of story-telling… a modern novel, which happens to be set in the 16th Century”.
Somewhat predictably, Mantel has had to turn into an interview machine to cope with the incessant questions of interviewers like myself. It’s a wearisome task. “I must admit, I’m getting very tired”.
Her planned trajectory into a life of “sex, drugs and rock and roll”, fuelled by the not inconsiderable prize money has had to be put on hold. “I haven’t been able to schedule it in yet.
“If I am meditating any extravagances, I haven’t had time to think about them yet because especially since the Booker, I’ve been shunted from one thing to another.
“It happened that I was publishing in America at the same time as the Booker Prize, that very week, so I had a whole lot of American media to do as well. It made for a very hectic life, which continues”.
The most recent pit-stop in Mantel’s busy schedule has been a sell-out event at the Showroom, part of Sheffield’s ‘Off the Shelf’ literature festival. The North isn’t unfamiliar ground for Mantel; she was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, and graduated with a degree in Law from the University of Sheffield back in 1973.
She’d transferred here for love; with her geologist boyfriend tied to a mapping area – the Peak District – it made sense to stop to-ing and fro-ing from LSE where she did her first year at university. “A Law student is more portable than the Peak District”.
The city met with her approval: “I liked Sheffield as a place to live – it was a town which was very friendly, which I think is still true now. People didn’t make a huge distinction between students and the rest of the community. They didn’t treat you as something alien and they kind of accepted you.
“Coming to Sheffield was a very different experience to the LSE. I can’t honestly say I preferred the course. I’d been doing different things in London so I found myself a little bit at sea. Of course, though, I’m grateful to Sheffield for taking me, for allowing us to be together.”
By the end of her second year, Hilary and Gerald were married. But despite her hopes, a career in law wasn’t to be – “I couldn’t afford any further training”. Instead, Mantel’s life took a series of twists, turns and geographical leaps – Botswana, Saudi Arabia and back again – which unavoidably informed her future writing.
Never one to be pinned down to a particular genre, Mantel’s work has included everything from short stories, personal memoir to contemporary fiction.
Wolf Hall is a rare gem of historical fiction, and she is vocal in her displeasure of those who tarnish the genre’s name. “It’s heartening that a novel like Wolf Hall can succeed”, she says, “because I think there is a certain amount of prejudice to overcome against historical fiction.
“It does have this tie-up with historical romance genre and you just have to hope that people are sufficiently open-minded to give it a go, to get over that. You get a lot of authors who simply use the past as a backdrop to fantasy”.
For writing historical fiction of the Wolf Hall variety is a very serious business. Accuracy and attention to detail are vital for Mantel, engendered as they were in Wolf Hall with the help of Mary Robertson, to whom the book is dedicated (“To my singular friend Mary Robertson this be given”).
Robertson, chief archivist of the Huntingdon Library in California, has a life-long interest in Cromwell, and the two fell into e-correspondence while Mantel was writing Wolf Hall.
“It’s really good to have someone in the course of a book who’s familiar with the background. As often happens, you begin a work-related correspondence and it turns into a friendship.”
Wolf Hall is the book that Mantel has always wanted to write and Cromwell her reason to write it. Because poor Thomas hasn’t been given history’s fairest light – he’s been caricatured, slated even; most recently described (by Henry the Eighth biographer, David Starkey) as ‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’.
Mantel has tried to recast him, plunging the reader into a gripping retelling of Cromwell’s often under-documented personal life.
“There’s an awful lot missing, because his early life, until about his late twenties, was very obscure. He came from a poor background and disappeared out of England at about the age of 15. Then there are various sightings of him popping up in different European cities. The stories, rumours and gossip can’t all be true.
“I pick him up again at the age of 27, just as he comes back onto the historical record. After that his public life is really well documented through a trail of official papers and letters. But his private life, again – a great deal of it is off the record. So there is a gap in which a novelist can go to work.”
Mantel is a keen advocate of what she calls “walking forward” in historical fiction. “Your characters couldn’t draw a moral from their own lives – they didn’t know what the conclusion was going to be.
“By the time you get most novels to the printer’s it’s all historical, unless you deliberately set them in the future. When you do that though, you’re still writing from your present day experiences, which are informed by your experience of the past.
“The events seen by a historical novelist look quite different from the same events viewed backwards by a historian. A historian is always looking back and they’ve always got the benefit of their experience of superior wisdom. I think what a novelist has to do is remind people that at the time, it wasn’t like that – nobody had the benefit of experience”
I couldn’t help but wonder if Mantel sometimes wishes for a time machine. “You could always do with more facts; they never do you any harm. Although, with the way some novelists treat facts, you would think that they did them harm.
“But I think that it’s up to you to organise your novel around the facts as we know them to be, rather than twist the facts to make a better drama.”
Writing, for Mantel, is as fundamental to life as eating and sleeping. “I’m never not writing. While I’m writing one book, I’ll be thinking over the next”.
I was surprised when she rejected the notion of her being a disciplined writer. “There are so many other things to do in the course of a day. Obviously, in the closing stages of a book, you try if you can to jettison your other commitments and then put in very long hours – as long as it takes, really. There’s a point where you see the end of a book – you see straight through it and you just want to go there. Other things recede”.
She doesn’t aspire to daily word targets; for Mantel, the key is “writing first thing in the morning, as soon as I wake up, before I have a conversation with anybody or do anything at all. That’s just the foundation for me – morning writing.”
Not one to rest on her laurels, Mantel is busy on the sequel to Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light, which concludes Cromwell’s story. “I would like to deliver it for publication in 2011, but I don’t know whether I’ll be able to make that. Hopefully, next year will see the paperback of Wolf Hall, and then the year after, the new book.”
I’ve no doubt she’ll do it. It’d be unfair to liken her to Cromwell, but with that certain steely glint in her eye, there’s some of the same ambition.