On Sunday evening, I was lucky enough to see Hilary Mantel (who I often mention on this blog) speak to a packed out crowd at the beautiful Sheldonian theatre as part of the Oxford Literary Festival. She closed what I imagine to have been an amazing string of lectures and talks in spectacular style. Introduced by, and in conversation with the current Bodley librarian Sarah Thomas (the first American, and also the first woman to hold this post), Mantel talked about the series that has brought her most critical acclaim, the Wolf Hall trilogy.
She opened with an extract from the second novel, Bring Out the Bodies, in which Henry VIII's court is brought to an eerie state by Anne Boleyn's decline. Her successor, Jane Seymour is being prepared for her own ascent, in a quietly brutal scene in which her mother dresses her hair with the elaborately and painfully pinned, but apparently puritanical headdress we often see in artistic depictions of her.
Mantel developed this into a consideration of character and visibility; how the outward signs and costumes, both physical and metaphorical, inform narrative. Talking about her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, she described the process of delving beneath the history and research in order to create a man, above all. She also had some spoilers for the audience for the final installment, The Mirror and the Light, but as I'm a greedy and selfish person, I'll let you find those out from more generous attendees...
She also stressed the importance of books very graciously in the light of being honoured by the Bodley library, one of the most beautiful and important public libraries in the world. Describing fiction as a conversation between the dead and the living, and the living and the dead, she stressed the vitality of the written word, and the book as alive; always lovely to hear in backlash to the digital panic.
If you ever get the chance to hear Mantel speak, leap at it. She had the audience thoroughly engaged; you got the sense of how important a writer she has become, and a sense of the kind of legacy she will leave. I felt really moved by the presentation of the Bodley Medal, which honours outstanding communicators and writers in the literary field, previously awarded to writers such as Seamus Heaney, Alan Bennett, and P.D. James.
If you haven't read Mantel's work, go ahead. Now! I would particularly recommend A Place of Greater Safety, a proper epic about the French Revolution, or Fludd, a quirky novella about a crumbling Northern church.
Hilary, I love you. We should grab an Earl Grey sometime.
