Browse content similar to Hilary Mantel: A Culture Show Special. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
Hilary Mantel used to be one of Britain's most under-rated writers, | 0:00:02 | 0:00:05 | |
but since winning The Man Booker Prize in 2009, | 0:00:05 | 0:00:08 | |
for her novel Wolf Hall, | 0:00:08 | 0:00:10 | |
she has received international recognition. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
Her fiction is dark, compelling and richly textured. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:17 | |
Its subject-matter ranges from The French Revolution | 0:00:17 | 0:00:20 | |
to the Court of Henry VIII, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:22 | |
from dysfunctional families in the North of England | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
to the life of a troubled psychic in Woking. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
"Wolf Hall" is an epic account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell | 0:00:27 | 0:00:32 | |
during the reign of Henry VIII. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
It was praised for the immediacy of its prose, | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
the power of its characterisation, and its savage sense of humour. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
Despite a recent interruption due to illness, | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
she's now working on its sequel, The Mirror and the Light. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:48 | |
In this intimate portrait for The Culture Show, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
film-maker James Runcie talks exclusively to Hilary Mantel | 0:00:50 | 0:00:55 | |
about her life and her work. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
She begins with a piece of advice. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
Trust your reader. Stop spoon-feeding your reader. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
Give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:24 | |
Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:30 | |
Cut every page you write by at least one third. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
Work out what it is you want to say. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:44 | |
Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:49 | |
Eat meat. Drink blood. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
Rise in the quiet hours of the night | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
and prick your fingertips, | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
and use the blood for ink. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
But do I take my own advice? | 0:02:11 | 0:02:13 | |
Not a bit. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
Hilary Mantel is an intense, troubling, and evocative writer. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:26 | |
Her principal themes are of history and individual identity, | 0:02:26 | 0:02:30 | |
religion and rebellion, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:32 | |
and the influence of the dead upon the living. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:35 | |
Her fiction asks how we come to be the people we are | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
and it occupies the hinterland | 0:02:39 | 0:02:41 | |
between what is real and what is imagined. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:45 | |
It's a world in which nothing is quite what it seems. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:49 | |
Hilary, whenever I read your work, | 0:02:50 | 0:02:52 | |
I have to say I find it rather unsettling and disturbing. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:56 | |
It makes me feel unstable. | 0:02:56 | 0:02:58 | |
Is that a deliberate effect? Are you seeking that effect? | 0:02:58 | 0:03:02 | |
I don't think I can help it. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
It's very much... | 0:03:04 | 0:03:07 | |
the way I view the world, I think. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:10 | |
I don't trust it tremendously. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
I always feel that if I put my hand through the wall, | 0:03:13 | 0:03:17 | |
my hand might go through it. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:19 | |
I think as a child, you see, I was always listening hard, | 0:03:20 | 0:03:24 | |
I was always trying to get some purchase on what was going on | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
or work out what was happening in the next room. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:31 | |
And...there's a little bit | 0:03:31 | 0:03:34 | |
in Wolf Hall, where Cardinal Woolsey says, | 0:03:34 | 0:03:40 | |
"Never let me hear you say | 0:03:40 | 0:03:42 | |
"you don't know what goes on behind closed doors. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:46 | |
"Find out!" | 0:03:46 | 0:03:48 | |
And that, I spent my childhood trying to do that, | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
so that becomes a habit. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:54 | |
You really do need to know for your self preservation | 0:03:54 | 0:03:58 | |
whether the devil is behind that door. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:01 | |
Not everyone thinks that. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
Fools! | 0:04:08 | 0:04:09 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
Hilary Mantel's disquieting imagination | 0:04:15 | 0:04:17 | |
has its roots in her childhood experiences | 0:04:17 | 0:04:20 | |
in the North of England in the 1950s. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
I grew up in a village on the fringes of the Peak District. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
A village called Hadfield, a mill village. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
A strange place, rather bleak, | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
on the edges of the moorland. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:39 | |
There was a sense of it being not just at the end | 0:04:39 | 0:04:42 | |
of the railway line from Manchester but rather at the end of everything. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:48 | |
It's a self-contained community, | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
where the people had a mordent sense of humour, | 0:04:50 | 0:04:56 | |
if it was a sense of humour. | 0:04:56 | 0:04:59 | |
The winter was very long in Hadfield. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:01 | |
The darkness seemed to last a long time. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:04 | |
"There is a colour of paint that doesn't seem to exist any more, | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
"that was a characteristic pigment of my childhood. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
"It's a faded, rain-drenched crimson, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
"like stale and drying blood." | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
"I use this paint scrape - | 0:05:24 | 0:05:26 | |
"oxblood, let's call it - | 0:05:26 | 0:05:29 | |
"to refurbish the rooms of my childhood, | 0:05:29 | 0:05:33 | |
"which were otherwise dark green, and cream, | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
"and more lately a cloudy yellow, | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
"which hung about at shoulder height, like the aftermath of a fire." | 0:05:40 | 0:05:45 | |
Hilary was born in 1952. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
This is the street where she lived, 12 miles from Manchester. | 0:05:53 | 0:05:58 | |
Her grandparents and great aunt lived at numbers 56 and 58 | 0:05:58 | 0:06:02 | |
and Hilary's childhood home was at number 20 Brosscroft. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:07 | |
The family were originally Catholic Irish immigrants | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
and that Catholicism was to have a profound impact on Hilary's writing. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:16 | |
I grew up unquestioningly within Catholicism, | 0:06:16 | 0:06:21 | |
so unquestioningly that I took it all onboard | 0:06:21 | 0:06:24 | |
and of course what it's telling you, | 0:06:24 | 0:06:27 | |
what you're being inducted in, from the age of four, | 0:06:27 | 0:06:33 | |
is the knowledge that there is another world, | 0:06:33 | 0:06:37 | |
that there is an invisible reality | 0:06:37 | 0:06:40 | |
which is far more important than this one. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
It is the realm of invisible angels around you, | 0:06:43 | 0:06:49 | |
it's the realm of what happens after death, | 0:06:49 | 0:06:53 | |
that life is actually transient and fairly meaningless. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
You have a destination - it's heaven or hell. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:00 | |
I think I took it as read that there was an unseen realm | 0:07:02 | 0:07:07 | |
and that's the bit I retained | 0:07:07 | 0:07:12 | |
when I ceased to believe in doctrine | 0:07:12 | 0:07:18 | |
and ceased to practice as a Catholic. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:22 | |
I think I still had a very profound sense of...the invisible, | 0:07:22 | 0:07:27 | |
which is just as well because it's in invisible worlds | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
that the writer spends her time. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:33 | |
When I was about eight years old... | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
..I was in the garden of our house in Hadfield. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:48 | |
I was alone. I cannot say I saw something... | 0:07:48 | 0:07:53 | |
..but I sensed something. Something seemed to be there. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:59 | |
And it was more a movement than an object. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:05 | |
A sort of slow spiral movement. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
And yet I couldn't say that I saw it, I was just aware of it. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:16 | |
And it just seemed to me to be incredibly evil, | 0:08:18 | 0:08:23 | |
the essence of evil. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
I immediately felt very sick. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
I felt as if in no time at all the thing had travelled inside me | 0:08:30 | 0:08:37 | |
and as if all the cells of my body were being spun around | 0:08:37 | 0:08:43 | |
in this really sinister motion. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
I don't really call it seeing the devil. | 0:08:46 | 0:08:49 | |
That's just the easiest way to describe it. | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
It was as if I had come upon a principle of evil. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
And I immediately felt ashamed and as if I were to blame, | 0:08:57 | 0:09:02 | |
because if I had just looked the other way, | 0:09:02 | 0:09:07 | |
I wouldn't have seen it. It was... | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
um... | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
A scene you were not meant to witness. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:15 | |
This vision was the first manifestation of Hilary's obsession | 0:09:18 | 0:09:22 | |
with a world beyond our own. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
It was a defining moment in her childhood, | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
one of many that are described | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
in her 2003 Memoir, Giving up the Ghost, | 0:09:30 | 0:09:33 | |
an account of her life that goes right back to her earliest memory. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:37 | |
"This is the first thing I remember. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
"I am sitting up in my pram. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
"We are outside, in the park called Bankswood. | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
"My mother walks backwards. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:52 | |
"I hold out my arms because I don't want her to go. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:56 | |
"She say's she's only going to take my picture. | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
"I don't understand why she goes backwards, | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
"back and aslant, tacking to one side. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
"The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, | 0:10:07 | 0:10:12 | |
"too quick to catch. The leaves part, the sky peers down at me." | 0:10:12 | 0:10:18 | |
"Away and away she goes till she comes to a halt. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
"She raises her arm and partly hides her face. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:28 | |
"They sky and trees rush over my head. I feel dizzied. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:32 | |
"The entire world is sound, movement. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
"She moves towards me, speaking." | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
"The memory ends." | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
What's your mother like? | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
My mother is a very beautiful, lively, gregarious, | 0:10:45 | 0:10:52 | |
rather dramatic woman. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:54 | |
Extroverted. And full of talents, | 0:10:56 | 0:11:00 | |
which, if she'd been born in a different place or a different time, | 0:11:00 | 0:11:06 | |
might've come out. She's a good singer, a dancer. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
She has all the minor graceful household arts. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
But of course at the age of 14, 15, | 0:11:16 | 0:11:20 | |
she was working in the mill. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:22 | |
That was what life was like, she did what everybody else did. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:26 | |
She could've had a far bigger life. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:28 | |
And I think, you see, she was struggling for something else, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
she wanted to get beyond the limitations of Hadfield. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:37 | |
And she was towing us children with her. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:41 | |
Hilary's mother Margaret was married to a man called Henry Thompson. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:48 | |
There are no surviving family photographs of him. | 0:11:48 | 0:11:51 | |
This is because, in the late 1950s, | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
Margaret found a new partner, Jack Mantel. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
At first, Hilary's father didn't leave home, | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
but moved into the spare room. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
Henry, my father, was... | 0:12:05 | 0:12:07 | |
..a very quiet man, it seemed to me. | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
He liked doing cross-word puzzles. He taught me to play chess. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
And he taught me that it is possible to sit quietly in a room. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:21 | |
And you can be reading a book and be a companion to someone else | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
who's sitting in that room reading a book. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
When Jack came into the household, | 0:12:30 | 0:12:34 | |
Jack was interested in weightlifting. | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
And he used to sing and be noisy | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
and I thought it was great, really, at first. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:46 | |
I didn't know what was happening. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:48 | |
And then, over the years, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:52 | |
from my being about seven years old to ten years old, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:56 | |
my father was still living in the house but more and more like a ghost. | 0:12:56 | 0:13:00 | |
It was as if he was just melting into the wall. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:04 | |
And then the year I was 11, the summer I was 11, | 0:13:04 | 0:13:08 | |
he melted away entirely, and I never saw him again. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:13 | |
He just left? | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
He left on the day the furniture van came and took us off to Romiley. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:20 | |
So there was abrupt closure. | 0:13:20 | 0:13:26 | |
My childhood was over. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:27 | |
I was starting again, new town, new name. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:30 | |
And it was as if the past was just written out, erased. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
And we had to not talk about the past. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:39 | |
But, of course, we'd only gone about eight miles, | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
so the secret we were keeping was a kind of open secret. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
And...we spent our days frantically bolting a door | 0:13:49 | 0:13:55 | |
that had already been kicked open. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
"After my first week at the convent, I went home to my mother, worried." | 0:14:00 | 0:14:05 | |
"'Big girls at school,' I told her, 'ask my why I've changed my name' | 0:14:06 | 0:14:14 | |
"'Tell them,' she said, 'that it's for private reasons.'" | 0:14:14 | 0:14:18 | |
"I tried out this turn of phrase. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:22 | |
"Private reasons." | 0:14:22 | 0:14:24 | |
"'Oh, yes,' the big girls said. 'We understand that. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:30 | |
"'But we want to know what they are.'" | 0:14:30 | 0:14:32 | |
The move to Romiley, just under ten miles from Manchester, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:39 | |
sharpened Hilary's awareness of the uncertain gap | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
between what could be spoken aloud, and what had to remain hidden. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:47 | |
And this gap, between public statements and private thoughts, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:51 | |
lies at the heart of her fiction. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:53 | |
When I was a child, things happened that very often | 0:14:55 | 0:15:00 | |
you didn't know if they were tragic or hilarious, | 0:15:00 | 0:15:03 | |
so...you stayed poised on that tightrope, | 0:15:03 | 0:15:08 | |
not quite knowing how to react. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
And I think there is something gleeful and childlike | 0:15:13 | 0:15:18 | |
in the humour that runs through all my books. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:23 | |
What I hope to do is knock the reader off balance for a moment | 0:15:23 | 0:15:27 | |
so they don't know whether to laugh or scream. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:31 | |
I don't want my reader ever to be settled. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
In the ideal world, the reader wouldn't be able to guess | 0:15:36 | 0:15:42 | |
what the next sentence might contain. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:44 | |
I aim to disconcert, I suppose. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:48 | |
But then I find life disconcerting, I find that it is like that, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:53 | |
that there are layers beneath the obvious of almost every interaction. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
Hilary lived in Romiley until she was 18. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
Although she was educated at a good Catholic girls school, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:10 | |
the '60s did not pass her by. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:13 | |
When I was a teenager I wasn't pretty but, I had the looks | 0:16:14 | 0:16:20 | |
that were very fashionable in the '60s, | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
because I had this long, fair hair | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
and...I was very slim. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:29 | |
It was what everyone wanted to look like in those days, | 0:16:29 | 0:16:32 | |
you know, walking around behind a curtain of hair. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
Did you get propositioned a lot? | 0:16:36 | 0:16:38 | |
People used to sing songs at me on the street. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
SHE LAUGHS Yes! | 0:16:42 | 0:16:44 | |
When Hilary was 17, her social life centred around Manchester. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:51 | |
Here she started dating Gerald McEwan, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
a man she's married not once, but twice. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
Hilary, have you got any pictures of Gerald as a groovy young man? | 0:16:59 | 0:17:03 | |
Well, we were just 20 when we were married so, um... | 0:17:03 | 0:17:08 | |
Yes, here is on our wedding day. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:12 | |
He looks profoundly unhappy. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
Of course, because we were so young, | 0:17:16 | 0:17:18 | |
people thought that our marriage was going to be a disaster. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:22 | |
Maybe that's why there was no professional record of it. | 0:17:23 | 0:17:27 | |
People thought it could be expunged all the easier | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
if there was no wedding album. | 0:17:31 | 0:17:33 | |
What does Gerald give you? | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
When I first met him, I thought, "How kind he is." | 0:17:38 | 0:17:44 | |
He was immensely good natured | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
and to me... | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
I don't like disputes and arguments on the domestic front. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
I want a quiet life, not to be torn up | 0:17:58 | 0:18:02 | |
by melodrama going on all the time. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:05 | |
And I think I saw the chance | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
of a much better, calmer, quieter life with Gerald. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:17 | |
Young writer's partners have a tough time of it. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:19 | |
Yes, I think so. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
This is why it's good to marry early and get them trained! | 0:18:23 | 0:18:27 | |
Hilary and Gerald were married when they were still students. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:33 | |
Gerald was set to be a geologist | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
while Hilary was training to be a lawyer, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
first at the London School of Economics and then at Sheffield. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:42 | |
She was hoping to become a politician. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
At first she had no intention of being a writer. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:49 | |
Then she fell ill. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
I first complained when I was 19. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
Going to the student health service and saying, | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
"I don't know really in what way I am ill, but I have strange pains | 0:18:59 | 0:19:04 | |
"and I really need to find out what's the matter." | 0:19:04 | 0:19:08 | |
But I was told that there was no physical condition | 0:19:11 | 0:19:13 | |
that could account for these pains, they were all in my mind. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
I was an over-sensitive, too intense, over-ambitious girl | 0:19:17 | 0:19:23 | |
putting too much pressure on myself | 0:19:23 | 0:19:27 | |
and producing these pains as symptom of stress | 0:19:27 | 0:19:33 | |
and I was dosed up with Valium and all the rest | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
and I was told to go away. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:40 | |
And...once it's in your medical records that you're a neurotic, | 0:19:41 | 0:19:48 | |
then, you know, everything you say or do goes to prove the case. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:53 | |
You can't break out of it, and all this time, | 0:19:53 | 0:19:56 | |
the physical damage was running on. | 0:19:56 | 0:19:58 | |
How has illness affected your life and your writing? | 0:20:00 | 0:20:04 | |
It's such a big question, you know. | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
Part of the reason I became a writer, | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
I think, part of the reason I made that choice... | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
..was that by the time I'd come out of university | 0:20:15 | 0:20:20 | |
I realised there was something badly wrong with me | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
and it wasn't madness and it wasn't being neurotic. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:28 | |
There was something physically wrong. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:32 | |
I obviously wasn't going to be a lawyer. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
I wasn't going to be a politician. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:38 | |
Both careers need more stamina than I had at my command. | 0:20:38 | 0:20:43 | |
And I began to think | 0:20:44 | 0:20:45 | |
that some of the visions I'd had of what my future would be, | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
I would have to write them off. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
I would have to find an occupation that left me in control. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
Where I could work my own hours. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:58 | |
And so very consciously I set up my stall to be a writer. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:03 | |
In 1974, at the age of 22, Hilary began to embark on an epic, | 0:21:06 | 0:21:12 | |
800 page account of the French Revolution | 0:21:12 | 0:21:15 | |
concentrating, essentially on the lives of three men - | 0:21:15 | 0:21:19 | |
Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins - | 0:21:19 | 0:21:21 | |
from the beginning of the Revolution to The Terror. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:25 | |
The novel was called A Place of Greater Safety. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:29 | |
She researched and wrote it in Manchester Central Library. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:34 | |
Sometimes people talk about the historical novel | 0:21:35 | 0:21:39 | |
as if there were two opposed camps, fact and fiction. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
That isn't so, at all. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:45 | |
And as soon as we learn any history | 0:21:47 | 0:21:52 | |
we should learn to be suspicious of that history. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:56 | |
We should learn to question the historical record all the time, | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
say, "I think I know this but why do I think I know it? | 0:21:59 | 0:22:04 | |
"Who's telling me this, and who wants me to believe it?" | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
"Who starts the riots that lead to the fall of the Bastille? | 0:22:07 | 0:22:13 | |
"Why him, why then? Why that particular moment? | 0:22:13 | 0:22:18 | |
"Could it have been someone else? | 0:22:18 | 0:22:22 | |
"And if it could have been, why wasn't it?" | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
These questions perplex me and they intrigue me | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
and I come back to them time and time again. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
The difference between political history as it is written on the page | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
and the way it feels to the person who is an actor inside it. | 0:22:36 | 0:22:41 | |
The intention behind the novel is to give history drama and immediacy. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:48 | |
The reader is thrown right into the middle of the action, | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
and follows Queen Marie Antoinette all the way to the guillotine. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
"The tumbrel waited in the courtyard. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
"It was an ordinary cart, once used for carrying wood, | 0:23:00 | 0:23:05 | |
"now with planks across it for seats. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:08 | |
"At the sight of it she lost her composure, she gaped in fear, | 0:23:08 | 0:23:12 | |
"but she didn't cry out. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:14 | |
"She asked the executioner to untie her hands for a moment, | 0:23:14 | 0:23:19 | |
"and when he did so she squatted in a corner, by a wall, and urinated." | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
"Her hands were tied again, and she was put into the cart. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
"Under the shorn hair and the plain white cap, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
"her tired eyes searched for pity in the faces around her. | 0:23:31 | 0:23:36 | |
"The journey to the place of execution lasted for an hour." | 0:23:36 | 0:23:42 | |
"She didn't speak. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:44 | |
"As she mounted the steps, paid, indifferent hands kept her balanced. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:50 | |
"Her body began to shake, her limbs to give way. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
"In her blindness and terror she stepped on the executioner's foot. | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
"'I beg your pardon, monsieur,' she whispered. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:01 | |
"'I didn't mean to do it." | 0:24:01 | 0:24:03 | |
"A few minutes after noon, her head was off." | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
While writing A Place of Greater Safety, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:18 | |
Hilary continued to experience the symptoms of an illness | 0:24:18 | 0:24:21 | |
that was to remain undiagnosed for eight years. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:25 | |
It was finally discovered to be endometriosis. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:29 | |
Unfortunately, you can't describe endometriosis in one sentence. | 0:24:30 | 0:24:35 | |
The endometrium is the lining of the womb | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
so this is a special tissue which is shed every month | 0:24:38 | 0:24:44 | |
in response to hormonal influence. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:49 | |
In endometriosis, this kind of tissue is found in other parts of the body, | 0:24:49 | 0:24:55 | |
typically through the pelvis | 0:24:55 | 0:24:57 | |
but it can be virtually everywhere in the body. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
Wherever it is, it acts like itself, so it bleeds every month. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
And then scar tissue builds up in the small spaces of the body. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
Depending where it is, you get a variety of symptoms. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
Quite a large variety of symptoms. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
Mostly involving pain and nausea and fatigue. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
So by the time it was diagnosed, I was 27, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
and I was in a very bad way. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
I was rendered immediately infertile | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
and it wasn't just a case of having a hysterectomy, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
my ovaries were removed so that at the age of 27, | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
I was plunged into menopause. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
And...it was...worse than one could have ever imagined. | 0:25:40 | 0:25:47 | |
"The visitor's idea of hospital is different from the patient's idea. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:55 | |
"Visitors imagine themselves trapped in that ward, in that bed, | 0:25:55 | 0:26:00 | |
"in their present state of assertive wellbeing. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:04 | |
"They imagine being bored, | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
"but boredom occurs when your consciousness ranges about, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
"looking for somewhere to settle. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
"But the patient's concentration is distilled, | 0:26:13 | 0:26:17 | |
"moment by moment. Breathing, | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
"not being sick, | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
"not coughing or else coughing in the right way, | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
"producing bodily secretions | 0:26:27 | 0:26:29 | |
"in the vessels provided and not on the floor. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:34 | |
"The visitor sees the hospital as needles and knives, metal teeth, | 0:26:34 | 0:26:39 | |
"metal bars, sees the foggy meeting between the damp summer air outside | 0:26:39 | 0:26:45 | |
"and the overheated exhalations of the sickroom." | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
"But the patient sees no such contrast. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:53 | |
"She can't imagine the street, the motorway. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:57 | |
"To her, the hospital is this squashed pillow, | 0:26:58 | 0:27:03 | |
"this water glass, this bell pull, | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
"and the nice judgment required to know when to use it." | 0:27:06 | 0:27:10 | |
"For the visitor, everything points outwards, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
"to the release at the end of the visiting hour, | 0:27:14 | 0:27:18 | |
"and to the patient, everything points inwards, | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
"and the furthest extension of her consciousness | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
"is not the rattle of car keys, the road home, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:30 | |
"the first drink of the evening, | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
"but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips, | 0:27:33 | 0:27:36 | |
"the flashing of figures on screens. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
"These are how you register your existence, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
"these are the way you matter." | 0:27:43 | 0:27:46 | |
After the endometriosis reoccurred, | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
when I was in my early 30s, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
I was given a drug which... | 0:27:57 | 0:28:01 | |
..doubled my size. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:04 | |
So, from being something like a pencil line on the wall, | 0:28:05 | 0:28:12 | |
I became the blossoming sofa-like creature you see now before you. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:19 | |
And that is very strange and, of course, it's... | 0:28:19 | 0:28:24 | |
for a woman... | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
It's terribly destroying to one's self image and self projection. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:35 | |
But what can you do? You're only given one body to live in. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:38 | |
You've just got to get on with it. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
"What I would have liked was a choice in life. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
"Leisure, to reverse my earlier decision | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
"that children didn't matter to me. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
"Leisure, to ask if circumstances or my mind had changed. | 0:28:52 | 0:28:57 | |
"No-one can predict that the game will be over for them | 0:28:57 | 0:29:02 | |
"at the age of 27. | 0:29:02 | 0:29:04 | |
"The time I fell in love is the time I should have acted, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:09 | |
"and now that an era of my life is over, | 0:29:09 | 0:29:12 | |
"and my school friends are becoming grandmothers, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:16 | |
"I miss the child I never had." | 0:29:16 | 0:29:19 | |
What's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being? | 0:29:20 | 0:29:26 | |
In the mid to late 1970s, | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
Hilary was still investigating the lives of the dead in her writing. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:43 | |
She supported herself financially by working, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
as her mother had done, in ladies fashions | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
at one of Manchester's largest department stores. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
Did it help your interest in people, working in the department store, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
seeing what people wore, seeing how they behaved, | 0:29:56 | 0:30:00 | |
early versions of characters? | 0:30:00 | 0:30:02 | |
I think I was doing it really so that I could keep my mind clear. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:08 | |
You know, I was at a bit of a loose end, um, professionally speaking. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:14 | |
What I wanted to do by that stage was to write my book. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:18 | |
I wanted to write A Place of Greater Safety. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:20 | |
I used to stand there, as it might be, | 0:30:20 | 0:30:24 | |
in the sheepskin department in August, | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
on a totally deserted fashion floor, | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
dreaming up what I was going to write when I got home. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:36 | |
So it was a job that left your mind vacant. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:38 | |
Hilary worked as a shop assistant for four years, but in 1977, | 0:30:42 | 0:30:47 | |
just before she finished writing A Place of Greater Safety, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:51 | |
her husband Gerald was offered a new job, as a geologist in Botswana. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:57 | |
The couple moved, but Hilary continued to work as she wrote, | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
this time as a teacher in the local school. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:05 | |
We were in Botswana for five years, the end of the 70s, | 0:31:05 | 0:31:08 | |
the early '80s. It was a very, very underdeveloped country at that time. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:14 | |
You had just one tarred road between our town and the capital. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:19 | |
It...was a good life in many ways, I did a lot of writing there, | 0:31:19 | 0:31:24 | |
But you were working in one of these very closed communities, | 0:31:26 | 0:31:31 | |
the expatriate society was very small, | 0:31:31 | 0:31:35 | |
very gossipy, very destructive. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:37 | |
Things happened that just wouldn't have happened in England, | 0:31:37 | 0:31:43 | |
the rate of attrition was terrible. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:47 | |
The...bad accidents, the premature deaths, the suicides, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:52 | |
the illnesses... the fulminating adulteries. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:58 | |
It's all the expatriate cliche, actually. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:02 | |
And the fact that you were cut off there, | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
it intensified, concentrated the evils of the whole process. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:12 | |
-Evils? -The evils, yes, I think so. | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
It was an unnatural way to live. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
It was a difficult time. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:22 | |
Although she was still writing, Hilary fell ill once more, | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
and the pressure on her marriage proved intolerable. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
When you marry so early, obviously what you're going to have | 0:32:31 | 0:32:36 | |
is a series of different marriages almost. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
And it's a cliche to say it, but it's true that you're going to change, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
maybe in different ways and at a different rate. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
We'd come to one of those points | 0:32:47 | 0:32:52 | |
where we seemed to be going in different directions. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
I felt not understood. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
And, I think... | 0:33:01 | 0:33:04 | |
also it was important to say that it was a double life crisis, | 0:33:04 | 0:33:09 | |
in that I had finished my book about the French Revolution. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:13 | |
I'd taken it back in the hope of selling it... | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
and I found myself in hospital instead. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:23 | |
The book was seen by one publisher, who rejected it. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
And...it felt like a series of doors slamming, you see. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:35 | |
So, by the time I went back to Botswana, | 0:33:36 | 0:33:41 | |
a lot of the things that had seemed important to me | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
now seemed irrelevant. | 0:33:44 | 0:33:46 | |
We separated. | 0:33:46 | 0:33:48 | |
18 months later, we met again. | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
Gerald was on the brink of going to Saudi Arabia. | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
And everything looked different. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
The couple had divorced in 1980 and re-married in 1982. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:10 | |
Gerald went to Saudi Arabia as a scientific editor | 0:34:10 | 0:34:14 | |
for the Ministry of Mineral Resources. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:17 | |
It was a secretive, claustrophobic world, | 0:34:17 | 0:34:20 | |
where it was made difficult for women to go out alone. | 0:34:20 | 0:34:24 | |
In many ways, Hilary was trapped. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
In the flat I lived the longest, I had to have the lights on all day | 0:34:28 | 0:34:33 | |
There were small windows, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:36 | |
they were high up and they were made of frosted glass. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:39 | |
The Saudis did not like the idea of people looking in or you looking out. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:45 | |
It was immensely lonely. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
What I did was to start another book. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
I think I had seen | 0:34:54 | 0:34:56 | |
that A Place of Greater Safety was not the novel | 0:34:56 | 0:35:00 | |
that I was going to break through into the market place with | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
and that I'd better write something that was short, | 0:35:04 | 0:35:08 | |
was more commercial, was the best I could do. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
That book was Every Day is Mother's Day, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:16 | |
the story of Muriel and Evelyn Axon, a reclusive mother and daughter | 0:35:16 | 0:35:22 | |
who are shut up in an English suburb and they work on each other. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:27 | |
At the beginning of the book Muriel is pregnant. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:31 | |
How can this be, as she never leaves the house? | 0:35:31 | 0:35:35 | |
Or, apparently not. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
And that whole first book leads up to the birth of Muriel's baby | 0:35:38 | 0:35:44 | |
and the question implanted in the reader's mind, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
"What on earth will happen when the baby is born?" | 0:35:47 | 0:35:49 | |
When Muriel Axon's child finally arrives, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
her mother suggests that the baby is not a real human being at all | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
but a fairy changeling. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
"'Look at it,' Evelyn said. 'You can't say it's human.'" | 0:36:03 | 0:36:08 | |
"'It might be a changeling. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:12 | |
"'If it is a changeling, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
"'you ought to give some thought to getting the real one back. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
"'The ones they take lead miserable lives. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:22 | |
"'They look in at people's windows. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:24 | |
"'Their growth's stunted. They're always cold.'" | 0:36:24 | 0:36:29 | |
"'It's a simple matter, Muriel. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:33 | |
"'You have to find some water, a river or something. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:37 | |
"'Float it along, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
"'and sometimes they pick it up and give you your own back.' | 0:36:39 | 0:36:45 | |
"They waited on the bank for ten minutes. | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
"It was quite dark now. | 0:36:48 | 0:36:51 | |
"'It must be dead,' Evelyn said at last. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
"'They won't give you anything for a corpse.'" | 0:36:54 | 0:36:58 | |
Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:10 | |
and its sequel, Vacant Possession, | 0:37:10 | 0:37:12 | |
created Hilary's reputation | 0:37:12 | 0:37:14 | |
as an investigator of the darkness of the human heart, | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
reflecting the terror of living below consciousness, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
of going down every day and every night | 0:37:21 | 0:37:24 | |
into the realm where the demons lie and the bodies are buried. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
Critics began to wonder what the real Hilary Mantel was like. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:33 | |
Your house, your arrangements are really normal. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:39 | |
They're almost a deliberate attempt to be normal. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:43 | |
I try to organise daily life to be as boring as possible... | 0:37:45 | 0:37:51 | |
..because you need to lead a boring life, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:57 | |
if the contents of your head are very exciting. | 0:37:57 | 0:38:00 | |
You cant have instability in every area of your life. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
And if your internal thought processes are full of horrors... | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
..then what you need in... | 0:38:12 | 0:38:16 | |
..everyday life is niceness. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:20 | |
You need blandness, security, safety and routine. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:26 | |
I don't believe it. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:29 | |
My daily life really is like that, as far as I can manage for it to be, | 0:38:31 | 0:38:37 | |
I'm a person who finds the world too much at every turn, | 0:38:37 | 0:38:43 | |
I have difficulty with noise, sometimes with bright light. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:49 | |
I have difficulty with people. I feel impinged upon. | 0:38:49 | 0:38:54 | |
I don't like too much conversation, | 0:38:54 | 0:38:58 | |
I like everything to be rationed, | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
so that my writing in my head can go on undisturbed. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
So a very little excitement is quite enough for me | 0:39:06 | 0:39:13 | |
because the contents of my head are exciting. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:16 | |
From the publication of Every Day is Mother's Day | 0:39:17 | 0:39:21 | |
and for the next 20 years, Hilary was able to write full time. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:26 | |
She used her experience in Botswana to write A Change of Climate | 0:39:26 | 0:39:30 | |
and in Saudi Arabia to publish Eight Months On Ghazzah Street. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:35 | |
She also continued to work in historical fiction, | 0:39:35 | 0:39:38 | |
finally publishing A Place of Greater Safety in 1992 | 0:39:38 | 0:39:44 | |
and then a disturbing account of the relationship | 0:39:44 | 0:39:46 | |
between the surgeon John Hunter and the Irish Giant O'Brian in 1998. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:53 | |
Then, in 2005, she put the two together | 0:39:53 | 0:39:56 | |
in a novel that was appropriately titled Beyond Black, | 0:39:56 | 0:40:01 | |
an unashamedly dark account of the permeable boundaries | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
between the living and the dead, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
featuring the spiritualist medium Alison Hart. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:11 | |
I was writing about a medium, | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
for whom those borders are very uncertain. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
That's not me. I thought, "Let's just exaggerate my position a little." | 0:40:18 | 0:40:26 | |
As it is, I have control over what I imagine | 0:40:27 | 0:40:32 | |
and I'm able to say to myself, "This is probably a hallucination," | 0:40:32 | 0:40:37 | |
and, "This is probably real." | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
But when I was writing about the medium, Alison, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
I was writing about someone who... | 0:40:43 | 0:40:48 | |
She's like a swinging saloon door, you know, | 0:40:49 | 0:40:53 | |
the dead just push through any time they like and she can't control it. | 0:40:53 | 0:41:00 | |
"Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit, | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
"she talked about passing into spirit world, | 0:41:06 | 0:41:09 | |
"to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot, | 0:41:09 | 0:41:14 | |
"neither hilly nor flat, where the dead, | 0:41:14 | 0:41:17 | |
"each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon, | 0:41:17 | 0:41:22 | |
"pass the ages with sod all going on." | 0:41:22 | 0:41:26 | |
"Spirit world, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden, | 0:41:30 | 0:41:36 | |
"or, to be more accurate, a public place in the open air, | 0:41:36 | 0:41:40 | |
"litter free like an old fashioned park, | 0:41:40 | 0:41:43 | |
"with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance." | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
"Here, the dead sit in rows on benches, | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
"families together on gravelled paths between weedless beds." | 0:41:51 | 0:41:56 | |
"There's a certain 1950s air about the dead, | 0:41:57 | 0:42:01 | |
"or early '60s perhaps, | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
"because they're clean and respectable | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
"and they don't stink of factories, | 0:42:06 | 0:42:08 | |
"as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation, | 0:42:08 | 0:42:13 | |
"but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse." | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
"Damaged livers have been replaced, | 0:42:20 | 0:42:22 | |
"so their owners live to drink another day. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:25 | |
"Blighted lungs now suck at God's own low tar blend. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:31 | |
"Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons' bin | 0:42:31 | 0:42:37 | |
"and blossom like roses on spirit chests." | 0:42:37 | 0:42:41 | |
How much of this do you believe? | 0:42:43 | 0:42:45 | |
There's a division in my mind between what I believe logically | 0:42:47 | 0:42:53 | |
and what I believe out of experience. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
Logic and reason tells me that... | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
..we don't have consciousness after death, | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
there IS nothing after death, there are no ghosts. | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
And certain known scientific laws are obeyed by all no matter. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:14 | |
But my experience suggests to me, | 0:43:15 | 0:43:17 | |
yes, there are ghosts and objects do move about | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
without human agency or mechanical means | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
and that the world is far stranger place... | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
..than we usually acknowledge. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
What I think is that if I hadn't had an education... | 0:43:33 | 0:43:37 | |
..if I hadn't learned to think and put the brakes on fantasy, | 0:43:38 | 0:43:45 | |
then instead of being a novelist, I would pursuing Alison's trade. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:50 | |
I would be a professional psychic. I think that's quite a possibility. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
You talk to the dead one way or another. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:57 | |
And you make it pay. | 0:43:57 | 0:43:59 | |
Financial success has enabled Hilary to live more comfortably | 0:44:02 | 0:44:06 | |
and from 2001 until earlier this year, | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
she lived on the edge of Woking, in a late Victorian building | 0:44:09 | 0:44:13 | |
that had previously been home to people | 0:44:13 | 0:44:16 | |
considered to be of unsound mind. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:19 | |
We're in a former lunatic asylum. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:23 | |
One of the hospitals built in the 1860s, | 0:44:23 | 0:44:28 | |
this great ring of asylums around London. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:33 | |
And this was a place that grew and grew. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
It was a self-sufficient community. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
As many of the hospitals were. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
And it was actually converted about ten years ago, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:47 | |
since when I've lived here. | 0:44:47 | 0:44:49 | |
It's tempting fate I suppose, isn't it? | 0:44:49 | 0:44:51 | |
Do you know, it's not tempting fate, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:53 | |
what it is, it's teetering on the brink. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:55 | |
It's saying, "I can mix with the insane dead and they can't get me." | 0:44:55 | 0:45:01 | |
Actually it's singularly free from ghostly manifestations. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:07 | |
It's disappointing, in a way. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
I did a lot of thinking about the relation of a place like this | 0:45:13 | 0:45:17 | |
to its own past and about history, as opposed to heritage. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:23 | |
About what the history people think they know. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:27 | |
And about memory. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:28 | |
This obsession with the past, buried historically and geographically | 0:45:30 | 0:45:34 | |
underneath the contemporary world, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
became the catalyst for Hilary's next novel, Wolf Hall. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
Told entirely in the present tense, | 0:45:42 | 0:45:44 | |
with the career of Thomas Cromwell at its heart, | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
Wolf Hall is a startlingly modern account of ambition, | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
survival and political intrigue in the 16th century. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:55 | |
I think it's a book that I was seeing as well as hearing, | 0:45:57 | 0:46:02 | |
as a sort of gold and black swirl | 0:46:02 | 0:46:05 | |
a kind of movement of darkness and light. | 0:46:05 | 0:46:09 | |
Something very glittery, something very much of another time | 0:46:09 | 0:46:14 | |
and so it was presenting itself at once through voices, | 0:46:14 | 0:46:20 | |
through image and drawing me on. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:23 | |
How do you know when you've done enough historical research to begin? | 0:46:23 | 0:46:28 | |
You don't. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:30 | |
Because I think when you're writing a particular scene | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
it may throw up a certain demand and you realise | 0:46:34 | 0:46:37 | |
you haven't got enough context. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
You can't just have someone walk in | 0:46:40 | 0:46:44 | |
without them trailing their complete biography, | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
which, of course, the reader never sees but you may need to know. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:51 | |
So, for me, the duel processes, writing | 0:46:51 | 0:46:54 | |
and research are interwoven, so there isn't a line you can draw. | 0:46:54 | 0:47:00 | |
You don't know what you need to know until the moment comes. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:05 | |
I have files that go alphabetically, on people. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:13 | |
Just their biographical facts. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:16 | |
And then I have files of ideas and objects... | 0:47:16 | 0:47:22 | |
..customs and manners, | 0:47:24 | 0:47:25 | |
in which there might be anything from philosophy to cookery. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:31 | |
It goes, "Memory, money, Machiavelli, magic, medicine," | 0:47:31 | 0:47:38 | |
and then, for some reason, it skips onto, "Palmistry, place, prophecies, | 0:47:38 | 0:47:43 | |
"Penshursts, round table, "Rome, 'sack of,' | 0:47:43 | 0:47:48 | |
"saint's days, tennis, Welsh, wardrobe and world views." | 0:47:48 | 0:47:53 | |
SHE CHUCKLES | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
I work from my notes onto the screen, | 0:47:56 | 0:47:59 | |
because my notes will evolve from being fact based | 0:47:59 | 0:48:04 | |
to being dialogue based. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:05 | |
They'll...shift themselves imperceptibly into drama. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:12 | |
But that's what I do. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:16 | |
I do dialogue. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:18 | |
So if you gave me the telephone book, I would make you a play out of it. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:23 | |
"He stands by a window. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:29 | |
"A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:35 | |
"Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings, | 0:48:36 | 0:48:42 | |
"they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, | 0:48:42 | 0:48:47 | |
"air, wings, black notes in music." | 0:48:47 | 0:48:52 | |
"He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure, | 0:48:52 | 0:48:56 | |
"that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, | 0:48:56 | 0:49:02 | |
"is ready to welcome the spring. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
"In some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:10 | |
"the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence." | 0:49:10 | 0:49:15 | |
"There is a world beyond this black world. | 0:49:16 | 0:49:20 | |
"There is the world of the possible. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
"A world where Anne can be queen | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
"is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
"He sees it, then he doesn't. The moment's fleeting. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:35 | |
"But insight can't be taken back. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
"You can't return to the moment you were in before." | 0:49:38 | 0:49:42 | |
The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2009, | 0:49:45 | 0:49:49 | |
goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall. | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:49:51 | 0:49:53 | |
The power of the story | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
and the arresting individuality of the prose, | 0:49:56 | 0:49:59 | |
muscular, unsentimental and acutely observed, | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
made Wolf Hall a prize-winning success. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
What was it like on the night for you? | 0:50:05 | 0:50:08 | |
The night of the Booker, what was that like? | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
Two of you go, the one who's going to win | 0:50:11 | 0:50:13 | |
and the one who's going to be the greatest loser | 0:50:13 | 0:50:16 | |
with a grin plastered on her face | 0:50:16 | 0:50:22 | |
I have had a lot of experience being the gracious loser... | 0:50:22 | 0:50:27 | |
so I made sure I was rehearsed in both roles. | 0:50:27 | 0:50:31 | |
'It was very undignified, really, | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
'because at the moment of the announcement, | 0:50:34 | 0:50:36 | |
'I shot to my feet as if I'd been fired out of a canon, | 0:50:36 | 0:50:40 | |
'as if not one more moment was going to go by. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:45 | |
'I should probably, you know,' | 0:50:45 | 0:50:48 | |
have had to be gently ushered to my feet by my friends. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:52 | |
It would have been more gracious. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
But, yes, part of you thinks, "I've worked for this," | 0:50:55 | 0:50:59 | |
and it is the ultimate recognition, the Man Booker, | 0:50:59 | 0:51:04 | |
that's what it's become | 0:51:04 | 0:51:06 | |
and, in a sense, it's something you want to get past. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:10 | |
Once you've won it, nobody thinks you ought to win it twice | 0:51:10 | 0:51:15 | |
and the pressure is off, in a sense, | 0:51:15 | 0:51:17 | |
so that you're waiting for that moment | 0:51:17 | 0:51:19 | |
and then you can start becoming the writer | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
that you meant to become all along. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:24 | |
This doesn't mean, however, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:27 | |
that the actual act of writing becomes any easier. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:31 | |
Hilary is now at work on the sequel to Wolf Hall, | 0:51:31 | 0:51:35 | |
The Mirror and the Light, and, in many ways, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:37 | |
it's like starting all over again. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
I never take for granted that anything is going to come right, | 0:51:41 | 0:51:46 | |
so every day I'm writing, I feel like a beginner. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:51 | |
There are absolutely no guarantees | 0:51:51 | 0:51:54 | |
that because you could do it yesterday you can do it today. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:59 | |
You can always write something but sometimes you have to endure... | 0:51:59 | 0:52:05 | |
barren days, when you're just plodding across the terrain, going, | 0:52:05 | 0:52:09 | |
"Subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object." | 0:52:09 | 0:52:13 | |
It will actually carry you there and give you something to work on... | 0:52:13 | 0:52:17 | |
..but, at the time, it can feel like the end of the world | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
because you're going so slowly, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
as if you've forgotten everything you've ever learned. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
I do have faith that given enough input, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:35 | |
just given enough graft, eventually it will take off | 0:52:35 | 0:52:40 | |
and you'll see that fleeting shape of a section in front of you | 0:52:40 | 0:52:46 | |
and you'll be able to grab it, get it onto the page. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:50 | |
That's very like chasing the ghost. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
It already exists, you see. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:57 | |
It's like the sculpture in the marble, | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
the ideal shape and form of the chapter exists, | 0:53:00 | 0:53:04 | |
you've just got to be there to grab it quickly. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:08 | |
Commencing in Wiltshire in September 1535, | 0:53:10 | 0:53:14 | |
The Mirror and the Light begins with the fall of Anne Boleyn | 0:53:14 | 0:53:18 | |
and the rise of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:22 | |
Once again, Thomas Cromwell is at the heart of the novel. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:26 | |
He's the arch plotter and schemer. | 0:53:28 | 0:53:31 | |
I don't think he quite knows what schemes | 0:53:31 | 0:53:35 | |
he might be forming up around Jane. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:39 | |
He has a...a feeling about her that she's in some way important. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:45 | |
But... | 0:53:45 | 0:53:47 | |
..until, in the first chapter of the sequel, | 0:53:48 | 0:53:51 | |
he looks out of the window, | 0:53:51 | 0:53:53 | |
he sees the king walking with her in the garden. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:57 | |
And when Henry comes in, he's wearing an expression, I say, | 0:53:59 | 0:54:04 | |
rather like a calf that's just been stunned by the butcher... | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
And then Cromwell knows. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:10 | |
And on that moment, a great deal will pivot. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:15 | |
Henry doesn't know. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:18 | |
Jane does. | 0:54:18 | 0:54:19 | |
That's great fun, you know, trying to work out | 0:54:19 | 0:54:24 | |
the characters various levels of awareness. | 0:54:24 | 0:54:27 | |
And I think it's something to... | 0:54:27 | 0:54:31 | |
..always bear in mind. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
Henry didn't know he was going to have six wives. We all know. | 0:54:36 | 0:54:41 | |
But he was hopeful with each one. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:43 | |
Each one was a fresh disaster waiting to happen in a different way. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:48 | |
But he had no perception of that. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:50 | |
We can look back and say, "Well, that one was doomed from the start." | 0:54:50 | 0:54:55 | |
But it is what historians can sometimes forget, | 0:54:57 | 0:55:00 | |
that people in the past... | 0:55:00 | 0:55:04 | |
..they could not adjust their behaviour | 0:55:05 | 0:55:09 | |
according to what was to come. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:11 | |
They could not draw morals from their own behaviour. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:14 | |
They were just sleep walking, they were walking into the dark. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
And I think when you are a historical novelist, | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
your job is to walk with them. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:22 | |
Earlier this year, | 0:55:28 | 0:55:29 | |
Hilary and Gerald felt that they wanted a change of scene | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
and decided to move to the seaside, to Budleigh Salterton in Devon. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:38 | |
It was intended as the fulfilment of a childhood dream. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:42 | |
This is a photograph of Hilary on the beach at Budleigh, | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
taken when she was 16. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
She has, perhaps at last, found a kind of peace. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:53 | |
Are you happy? | 0:55:55 | 0:55:57 | |
From time to time, yes. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
It may sound like a superficial answer, | 0:56:02 | 0:56:06 | |
but it depends almost entirely on the last sentence I wrote. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:11 | |
If it was a good one, I'm happy. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
If I'm plunged into uncertainty about that sentence, | 0:56:14 | 0:56:18 | |
I have to live with a lot of ambivalence | 0:56:18 | 0:56:21 | |
and ambiguity as to whether something is going to work, | 0:56:21 | 0:56:26 | |
whether my scene is going to work. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:28 | |
So I don't have the temperament that's ever going to be able | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
to stand back and say, "I am happy," | 0:56:32 | 0:56:36 | |
cos I'm always going to say, | 0:56:36 | 0:56:37 | |
"Could be a bit happier, with a few adjustments." | 0:56:37 | 0:56:41 | |
But I am beginning a new phase of my life. | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
Because I'm going to live by the sea, which I've always wanted to do. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:51 | |
And... | 0:56:55 | 0:56:56 | |
..I'm hoping for a bit more inner calm. | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
I want to watch the sea | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
and learn from it. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:06 | |
Because the pattern is irreversible, irreducible. | 0:57:10 | 0:57:15 | |
There may be a storm blowing up | 0:57:15 | 0:57:19 | |
but basically you have the same... | 0:57:19 | 0:57:23 | |
waveform...coming and going. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:28 | |
It's almost as if I'm wanting to hear my own heartbeat. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
I think that's what I'd like to be able to do. | 0:57:33 | 0:57:37 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:03 | 0:58:06 |