A Place of Greater Safety

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In this well-researched book, she draws flesh and blood portraits of the leaders of the revolution and what led them to the events of that stormy time. You feel embedded in it, experiencing what drove them from crisis to crisis and directed their actions. You see their relationships, their trials and their temptations. Although the details have to be surmised, they are based on careful analysis of the writings of the real people involved, drawing out their motivations and beliefs. Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.” An extraordinary and overwhelming novel...immensely detailed and yet fast-moving...she has set herself to capture the excitement and intellectual fervour of the period. She does it admirably...a tour de force.’ Scotsman

The middle period of Cromwell’s life sees him at the apogee of his success: history’s most successful accountant, a loyal family man and an embodiment of his own maxim: “Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.” Anne Boleyn has been beheaded along with several of his deadliest enemies. But though a sort of peace has broken out, it’s “the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home”. The Mirror and the Light (2020)Contrary to the tendency in Anglophone media to focus on the crumbling of "l'Ancien Regime," A Place of Greater Safety is explicitly told through the eyes of the revolutionaries, opting to explore the lives of the previously-unknown men and women who gained fame and infamy in the swells of the Great Revolution. 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. The writing is so very good. Very Hilary Mantel. It is worth bearing in mind that this was her first - that's right - first novel and was written when she was 22 years old! In the interview that she does at the end of the Kindle version, she tells the interviewer that it nearly killed her; that she put it onto a shelf for decades before it was resurrected by new circumstances in her writing career. Maximilien Robespierre: An earnest young provincial lawyer; slight, sober, and punctilious. He is unassuming, reliable, and competent, but a bore. Abhors the sight of blood.

The novel is written in darting, suggestive sentences; the dialogue, in all its stoical tones and elements of good and bad humour, is like a chorus, or a commentary on life and its hardships. Using hints and clues, a deceptive indirection, Mantel allows us to enter the wounded spirit of her giant and the restless mind of the inquiring and ambitious doctor-cum-bodysnatcher. Their circling of each other is conducted with slow subtlety, but also with an unsparing sense of doom. If you could take any character from A Place of Greater Safety out to dinner, who would it be and why? I found the book enthralling, and at times it was difficult to put down. Mantel's ability to infer information about the leaders is very intuitive, and this is the quality which really makes this historical novel great. The only slight downside to the book, but bear in mind this is completely down to personal taste, was that at times I felt that as a reader, one had to pay very close attention to Mantel's writing to fully understand her inferences, making it a book best read when fully awake, and not, perhaps the best choice for a relaxing evening read.

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Even so, buying A Place of Greater Safety was still a bit of a whim, as I didn't have much time in which to choose, but was still desperate to be exposed to Mantel's writing. Being very interested in history, particularly the French Revolution (in which the novel is set), the book turned out to be the perfect choice for me, as Mantle's ability to seamlessly interweave fact with fiction proved to be excellent. The arc of the third and longest part of the trilogy is framed by a conversation between Cromwell and the Spanish ambassador: “What will you do,” asks the ambassador, “when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?” Cromwell’s downfall and death are a matter of fact; Mantel’s skill is never to let the tension drop as the mythologised life of an ordinary man, with no pedigree, unravels amid the treachery of a class-based realpolitik. Mantel Pieces (2020) verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{