Hilary Mantel wins the Booker

Earlier this year, I read Joan Acocella’s essay about writer Hilary Mantel in her wonderful compilation of essays Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella’s essay is online, it’s called Devil’s Work (it was originally published in The New Yorker, as most of these pieces were). I wrote about Acocella’s book here. I wrote that Acocella has the gift of making me want to know more about whomever her subject is. The book includes profiles of dancers and choreographers, of course, because that is Acocella’s main topic, but there are also numerous essays about writers, many of which I am not familiar with at all. She makes you want to rectify the gaps in your education IMMEDIATELY, and that, to me, is high high praise.

As I mentioned, one of the profiles in the book is Hilary Mantel, who just won the Booker Prize for fiction, for her Tudor-era novel Wolf Hall. I haven’t read any Hilary Mantel, but boy, after reading Joan Acocella’s piece, I thought: Get on the stick, girl! This was the case with so many of Acocella’s essays! Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, Joseph Roth – the list goes on and on. Her main area of interest appears to be Jewish writers, writing at the time of the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I am not familiar with those writers in the slightest. But she also has essays on Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, H.L. Mencken, and Hilary Mantel.

Acocella writes of Mantel:

Mantel has experimented with her gift; her books jump from genre to genre. After Mother’s Day and an even blacker sequel, Vacant Possession (1986), she wrote a political thriller about Saudi Arabia. Eight Months on Ghazza Street (1988), which announced, if her previous books had not, her grievance over the status of women. The next novel was Fludd (1989), a theological mystery story. Here the Devil appears in person – he is handsome, has money, and is terrific in bed. Later, there was a coming-of-age novel, An Experiment in Love (1995), and, on its heels, something wildly different, The Giant, O’Brien (1998), which, like A Place of Greater Safety, is set in the late eighteenth century, and concerns a freakishly tall Irishman who, starving at home (this was during the clearances), goes to London to make money by exhibiting himself as a curiosity. The book is biting in its politics and extravagant in its style. (The giant, a professional storyteller, often speaks in the language of Celtic romance.) In 2003, Mantel published her memoir, which, for all its useful information, I admire less than her other books, because it alone seems to complain. In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way.

I don’t know about you, but that paragraph makes me very VERY interested in Mantel.

And so, congratulations to a writer I am only familiar with through Acocella, for winning the Booker. Mantel has not had an easy life. She has poured that difficulty into her books, which are the opposite of confessional (one of the reasons why I think I might like her stuff). When Mantel was a child, she saw the Devil standing by her back fence.

It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

Strange, to feel a connection with a writer I have never read. Here is a really enjoyable interview with her, about winning the Booker. I just really like her, as a person. She says

“It’s a very odd thing because you prepare for failure, so two of you go to the Booker dinner – the one who is going to win and the one who is going to lose. And I’m not quite sure if I’ve shaken off my double yet. I’m still living in two realities. It really is a big thing. I would never try to be cool about it. You know it is going to change your career.”

I love that.

And the last quote from her in the article, about the sequel to Wolf Hall she is working on, brought tears to my eyes:

People have been saying, ‘Hurry up’. One lady expressed a wish that the sequel would come along soon and put ‘PS I am 94’. It made me feel very responsible. I hope she’ll read it by 96.

“PS I am 94.”

I am grateful to Joan Acocella for introducing me to Hilary Mantel, even just as a person, and I look forward to all the catchup work I have to do.