There is an excellent article in the New Yorker about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring up the Bodies
(due out here in just a few days' time). James Wood puts his finger on where the author's gifts lie, and any novelist would do well to take note of the points he makes, I think.
"She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case."
"... when a historical fact is central to a novelistic detail, Mantel uses it in a way so novelistically intelligent that the historical fact seems to have been secretly transposed into a fictional one ..."
"[she] has made a third category of the reality, the plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter what might happen."
"If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is, you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag. They are intelligent, but they are not novelistically intelligent. They copy the motions but rarely inhabit the movement of vitality. Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real. Her two most recent novels concern famous historical events—Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, her execution at the King’s orders, the English split from the Roman Church and the authority of the Pope—but they make the stories fragile again, with everything at suspenseful risk."
Those are such good comments on Mantel - and on what makes historical fiction work. I hardly ever read historical fiction, and then when I do, I remember that I love it! I must be one of the last people in the country to read Wolf Hall. Looking forward to it, though!
Posted by: litlove | 30 April 2012 at 09:08 PM
"what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one..." that makes a lot of sense. It's a novel we're reading, not a news article, or, a police report. I can understand how this can be extended to film adaptations of novels, that they need to create 'movie moments', since now, it's a visual medium and a totally different art form. Thanks for an interesting and helpful post.
Posted by: Arti | 01 May 2012 at 04:42 AM
I actually really didn't like Wolf Hall, I found it totally overwritten
Posted by: craftygreenpoet | 01 May 2012 at 07:59 AM
I couldn't disagree more with what this writer says. I much prefer Peter Ackroyd's books to Hilary Mantel's and I certainly wouldn't call them 'worthy' in that putting down way. Try English Music, which shows a wonderful feeling for the past and takes you there.
Posted by: Barbara | 01 May 2012 at 07:59 AM
I must come in and say I loved the first-person writing of Wolf Hall. It gave such immediacy to the story. I'm not a reader of historical fiction, I prefer my history to come in fact form. However, Hilary Mantel's writing overcame my prejudice. My copy of Bringing Up The Bodies has been ordered for months. As soon as it arrives, all other reading will be cast aside!
Posted by: Claire | 01 May 2012 at 08:24 AM
I read solidly through the first half or so of"Wolf Hall" but then did bog down--I still can't force myself back to it. WHY is it so long? I am an avid fan of Hilary Mantel's and this was a big disappointment. But I am looking forward to "bringing Up the Bodies' and maybe this will lead me back to the first volume.
Posted by: Erika | 02 May 2012 at 02:47 PM
Sitting on a beach in Cebu in the Philippines, I am reeling at the New Yorker comments about Ackroyd. Not novelistically intelligent? I am staggered, having read many of his novels with admiration and enjoyment - he is an extraordinarily wide ranging writer - histort, novels, non-fiction about London, literary biography and criticism - but also a wide ranging novelist, and am immensly ambitious one. Hawksmoor, Chatterton and The House of Doctor Dee are masterpieces.
I cannot comment on Mantel's writing, having been put off by hearing an excrutiating interview with her on radio, in which she was, I thought, pompous and vague at the same time, and seemed to that her novels had the same validity as real history. This maybe quite unjust, but I have read one or two crushing reviews (a small minority, I know)of her approach to history and am ill-inclined to make the experiment. I am with Barbara on this one! Perhaps you can convince me to ty Mantel?!
Posted by: Lindsay | 05 May 2012 at 12:13 PM