Building Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel Versus Literary Fiction

Hilary Mantel is a genre writer.

This is not an insult—in her case in particular, it’s a compliment. It’s also a narrow claim about her famous Thomas Cromwell trilogy, rather than the many novels by her that I haven’t read. For all I know, Fludd (1989) might be the most delicately literary flower that ever bloomed. If you’ve read Wolf Hall or Bring Up the Bodies, you know there’s nothing delicate about Thomas Cromwell.

There’s also nothing delicate about the recently released final installment in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which clocks in at over 750 pages in its American hard-cover edition. When a novel is both a doorstop and the third in a series, we’re already far from the safe shores of contemporary LitFic.

When you open The Mirror and the Light, you’re ushered into something else that LitFic finds suspicious: A world. A world that’s been—horror of horrors—world-built. We learn about the details of 16th-century English cooking, about what it was like to get dressed in the morning, about the kinds of allergies you might suffer if you had to do a quick ride out into the countryside to inquire after one of Henry VIII’s bastard children. Here’s how Mantel’s narrator—close to Thomas Cromwell, to the point of often uncomfortable intimacy, without actually being him—describes one of Cromwell’s endless administrative thoughts during one of those countryside excursions:

For the last year, he has been rebuilding a place made over to the king by the Earl of Northumberland. Young Harry Percy is sick, and deep in debt to the crown. He offered in part-payment the house with all its contents; Henry had said, why don’t you move in, Crumb, during the renovations, then you can keep a hand on the workmen? With young Sadler building his house just across the meadow, you can redirect the labour as needed… The king had sent seasoned oak from the royal forests, and he and Rafe had set up a brickfield, the water from the brook supplying it. Mercy had said, ‘You’ll see, Thomas, as soon as all the hard work is done, Henry will turn you out.’

Of course—but it’s the king’s house, after all. He is laying out a new garden and he has ambassadors alert for cuttings and seeds, of plants not grown in England. Light will flood the old rooms. There will be no HA-HAs, nor need he bear the arrogance of Hone’s glaziers—James Nicholson is just as skilled at a lower rate.

I very much enjoy this passage, which succeeds in making us feel immersed in the consciousness of a political operator from almost 500 years ago. We get the finely honed details that feel practical rather that flourished: “seasoned oak from the royal forests” and light flooding the old rooms. The risks Mantel takes with flow—semicolons, ellipses, em dashes, jumping around in tenses—all work toward an emotional and intellectual believability that in turn further opens the already vibrant universe of the trilogy. Character is the first principle, from which plot and world and theme smoothly spring. In the most important sense, this is just good fictional prose.

And yet it’s not quite typical literary prose. Absent are the diamond-lasering away of superfluous words, the militaristic discipline around punctuation, the anxious need to end sentences as quickly and concretely as possible. Mantel is interested in the sensory details that are one of the major currencies of “literary craft,” but she’s also unafraid to be digressive, sometimes even muddled, in the service of rendering the complex sumptuousness of Cromwell’s reality. Sometimes bringing a historical figure back to life and situating him in an approximation of his world means piling on unconventional sentence structures and being unafraid of awkward clauses that capture the rhythms of self-justification and other messy interiority. These are admirable practices for a novelist, but all of them would be looked upon with suspicion in most MFA workshops and many other “literary” spaces.

Here’s that first paragraph rendered in a dialect of MFA-ese:

He remembered the sappy musk of the seasoned oak of the royal forests. The scent had hung over the Earl of Northumberland’s former manor even after the workmen had done most of their sweating, sawing and hammering the oak into the old house. On the day Harry Percy, the sickly young earl, handed the place over to Cromwell, he told him that the lapping brook on the eastern end of the property could help the brick-makers. Cromwell helped shape the bricks himself, the clotted red earth sieving between his fingers like a winter venison stew, coating his hands in the dirty spoils of kingship.

This is parody, but a loving one that’s not too far from some of my own work. I hope what comes across most clearly is the fixation on tactile directness, the pious belief that the problems of the novel form can be solved if only we can bring the reader into close enough contact with the physical reality of the character’s experience. This contact should be achieved poetically, but not too cleverly—no sin is worse than intellectual pretension, even as LitFic declares its intellectual superiority over books that take the time to lay out the physics of a spaceship’s warp drive. And the sentences must be sharp, whittled to a point by years of being provocatively read by colleagues (real or imagined) who insist that a single procession of a dozen or so words can irreparably alienate the reader if those words are anything other than adamantine.

Of course, across genres and forms, you can get away with a lot at the sentence level if your story is good enough. What does good enough mean? It could mean a sprawling-yet-intimate epic that stands as one of the finest ever achievements in “historical fiction.” Indeed, that well-worn genre is also not capacious or dynamic enough to capture what Mantel has been doing since Wolf Hall. The genre she works in may well be entirely her own, which is perhaps the highest compliment we can pay a novelist.

So when I say Mantel is a genre writer, I don’t necessarily mean that her trilogy belongs to a narrowly defined genre outside of the literary. I apply the label provocatively and somewhat ironically—if you’re writing novels and you’re not distinctly “literary,” then according to our impoverished, capitalism-tortured jargon, you must be “genre.” Most importantly, I mean that Mantel has pursued her project without deference to the accumulated neuroses of the last 75 years or so of LitFic, and with enough self-license to spend the final book luxuriating in what she’s created, even as an inevitably grim end approaches. Much like the many religious zealots who sprinkle Mantel’s pages, either defying or deifying Rome, we would benefit from naming our own parochialisms. To be “literary” has never meant that you’re telling a superior story.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

I’ll admit I’m pretty beat as I write this, so I’m trying to have as much fun with this choice as possible:

Tracer Bullet never quite took hold in Watterson’s repertoire in the way Spaceman Spiff or even Stupendous Man did. That’s probably because hard-boiled noir is a tough genre to pull off, even as a spoof, when your protagonist is six years old. Calvin and Hobbes is generally about the way the world might appear broken to an imaginative kid, whereas noir is about the way the brokenness of the world manifests in the most adult, tawdry, vice-laden ways.

You catch a whiff of that louche grownup-ness when Calvin refers to his mom as a “dame” and implies he’s carrying around an old bullet wound. In this first ever appearance for Tracer Bullet, there are also references to the adult plagues of debt and bad business. The final joke, of course, is that Calvin is thoroughly not an adult. He has to listen to his mom and eat whatever she puts in front of him. He doesn’t even get to wear a hat.

I enjoy Tracer Bullet—that’s why I pulled up this strip at a moment when my mind is fried. Still, I don’t know that this mode works in the lush way that, say, Spaceman Spiff does. Fantasies of space exploration and fighting aliens open up the possibilities of a kid’s mind. Noir forecloses on all the innocent hopes of childhood. Watterson tended to prefer to err on the side of possibility.

Other fun things

— From Ranjan Roy, a wild story about the mind-boggling economics of app delivery services

— Matt Lubchansky tipped me off to a new project by The Nib about inequality during the time of well… you know

— If you’re looking for other newsletters, Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davison is the authoritative resource for world affairs and international relations. He touches on historical tidbits and generally manages to keep it fun and witty within the purview of these serious topics. Derek also podcasts and is an all-around savant on these topics, so definitely check out his work

(If you have something you think would be good for this section and has flown somewhat under the radar, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email)

A poem

Kay Ryan is pairing ravens and crows