Hilary Mantel lives in a lunatic asylum. Admittedly it hasn’t been a lunatic asylum for a while — the site was converted into flats 20 years ago, and Mantel and her husband are up on the top floor in a scrupulously ordered apartment with views over the treetops of Woking.
Nonetheless, there’s something apt about her choice of home. It’s not that Mantel herself comes over as remotely mad. With her china-blue eyes and her chalk-white skin, she looks like a figure from a Dutch painting, and exudes a similarly contained, watchful air. But just as some of the building’s grim history seems to seep up from below, so darkness is never far below the surface of her fiction.
In Wolf Hall, her huge (651-page) account of the life of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, the elaborate formality of Henry’s court cloaks endless serpentine scheming. Plotters whisper in candlelit corridors, women compete to hurl themselves into Henry’s lap, while all the time relations with Rome slip ever deeper into the mire. The book is the favourite to win this year’s Booker Prize — William Hill currently has it at 2:1
Mantel, now 57, had been toying with writing about Thomas Cromwell ever since she was in her twenties. But always something — nerves, ill health, other projects — held her back. When she did finally start, the book took her four years to write. By the time she finished, she says, ‘I was completely in tatters. I remember the day I finished it, I felt so cold I was shivering. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to anything I’ve written before.’
She’d first come across Cromwell as a Roman Catholic schoolgirl in rural Derbyshire.
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