Footpaths #9: What Mantel does

Wednesday 09 July 2025

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View of the Thames with the Old Palace of Placentia at Greenwich. Source.

A note: writing a novel is like maintaining the ship of Theseus. You keep replacing parts until nothing remains of the original vessel. Yet it is still the same story.

Some fragmentary notes on Hilary Mantel’s writing:

What does Hilary Mantel do? I’ll tell you.

She makes you check the date in the book. July 1539. April 1793. You relax a little. Good. A year is a whole twelve months away, and it might be alright this time. I’ll be alright.

You see great open plains and small closed rooms. Sensible to stop now, but you read on through evening light into summer dark, feeling fingers become paper and ink, your pulse falls in step with a long-dead, future-blind life-yearning heart.

This is what Hilary Mantel does.

The Three Book Trick

On the road, Cromwell learns the Three Card Trick, so he’ll never go hungry. It’s a confidence trick and a sleight of hand. Flick of the wrist, and the queen is gone. Three books, three queens.

At her desk, Hilary Mantel writes the Three Book Trick, writing Cromwell from the tail of his eye. It’s a confidence trick and a sleight of hand. Three books, three Cromwells. Swipe of the axe, and he is gone.

The Cromwell trilogy as Humours

In Wolf Hall, we marvel at our good humour. We are sanguine, a creature of springtime. The physician says we are phlegmatic: calm and collected, carefully reserved. We are not cautious.

In Bring Up the Bodies, choleric yellow bile takes over our nature. It infects the body politic. This is a summer of hot emotions: we must be ambitious, decisive, and aggressive. We must not fail. “Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.”

In The Mirror and the Light, black bile is ascendant. The humour of melancholy and of autumn. Outwardly, we must be “Jolly Tom of Putney.” But our insides have other ideas.

The Cromwell trilogy as River

Wolf Hall is the source of the stream. No one is entirely sure where it begins, but pennies are cast at springs where some say the story starts. Many beginnings feed the river: some mythic; for some of the year, these stream beds are dry and dormant, holding only the memory of water. But all the water flows downhill towards the king in his castle.

Bring Up the Bodies. We are mid-river, where the course gathers force. This river is frightening, and it moves anything that enters it or gets in its way. But the land demands it fall in a great cascade, down down down, and there is no way of getting back.

The Mirror and the Light is the tidal estuary. Liquid gravity meets a new power that is lunar, moon-driven, oceanic. It delays our passage and pushes us back upstream. Life’s debris oozes up from the mud on the banks. Then the tide is with us, and we are dragged out to sea.

Melencolia I, Albrecht Dürer, 1514. Source.