A Place of Greater Safety

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Hilary Mantel has soaked herself in the history of the period...and a striking picture emerges of the exhilaration, dynamic energy and stark horror of those fearful days.’ Daily Telegraph Mantel’s comments about the Duchess of Cambridge caused unexpected controversy. Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage I don’t really talk about writing very much to other writers. There’s one writer—Adam Thorpe. Adam lives in France and I never see him, but if he were to walk in, we’d have a proper conversation. It would be about writing. And I think he’s the only person I have that kind of relationship with, and I haven’t heard from him for months. I would never do that. I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama. I know that history is not shapely, and I know the truth is often inconvenient and incoherent. It contains all sorts of superfluities. You could cut a much better shape if you were God, but as it is, I think the whole fascination and the skill is in working with those incoherencies.

I was on evening duty, and somebody jumped on me. It wasn’t a sexual thing. There were a group of pupils, with one person hitting me. Compared to what could have happened, it was trivial. It was dark, they were not my ­pupils, I couldn’t identify them, the school wasn’t interested in finding out. It was a shambles. I felt unsupported by the headmaster, and so I left, but I didn’t want to go, because I liked my pupils. As I said, the book starts with each of the three main characters’ childhoods and continues through their early careers as lawyers in the early 1780s, and then through the Revolution. Mantel also writes about their personal lives and relationships, some of which might be her invention. Desmoulins is a brilliant man, but not usually a great public speaker, because he has a stutter, which, according to Mantel, began when he was sent to boarding school at seven. It might have been the trauma of the separation from his family that caused it, even though he is never particularly close to his family, and his father often seems disappointed in him. His stutter disappears when he is angry or excited, famously so in July 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, when he gives a rousing speech in the Palais-Royal, calling people to arms. Desmoulins’ speech is one of the events that leads directly to the storming of the Bastille. While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else.You worked on A Place of Greater Safety, your first novel about the French Revolution, decades before it was published. It means a great deal of unselfishness on Gerald’s part. I worry about that. Somebody said to him last week, Isn’t it like being Mrs. Thatcher’s husband? Which I thought was unflattering to us both. The other thing I worry about is if he’s lonely, because I’m preoccupied with my work and I don’t expect to have people around me, whereas Gerald had colleagues all those years. However, with these theater productions, we’re plunged into a world of sociability. And he’s become part of the group. Though you’re extremely hesitant to tamper with history, and though of 159 characters in the books there’s only one created out of whole cloth, you must have invented most of Cromwell’s private life.

There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it?cast of characters is wide and varied, from a conventional civil servant to Robespierre and his acid sister, Charlotte, from Choderlos de Laclos, the author of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," to the naive and enthusiastic Lucile, It strikes me as daringly modern. You’ve given Cromwell a fond companionate marriage that resonates with contemporary readers.