I read this ahead of a Book Group in June 2021 having previously read it in early April 2020 (just after the start of lockdown). In the comments belowI read this ahead of a Book Group in June 2021 having previously read it in early April 2020 (just after the start of lockdown). In the comments below the review I have added my notes from the author’s brilliantly produced interview with Peter Florence at the 2020 virtual Hay Festival.
This book was on my radar since the Guardian’s Alex Preston in his 2020 preview said it was the book that might beat Hilary Mantel to her third Booker.
The book of course beat Hiliary Mantel won the 2020 Women's Prize, the 2020 Waterstone's Book of the Year (from the UK's best bookseller), the National Book Critics Circle Award (one of the very few US awards open to UK writers), the 2021 British Book Awards Best Fiction "Nibbie" and so on.
It was also, to the considerable deteriment of the Booker not even longlisted for that prize (which was distinguished in 2021 only by its Winner). That omission I think resulted in its unusual shortlisting for the 2020 Guardian Not The Booker (unusual in that the Guardian website BTL votes which are used to pick half that shortlist are normally dominated by author and publisher lead campaigns on small books) - a prize for which the judges (of which I was one) decided it was too good to be a winner.
My thematic thoughts on the book - including some extensive quotes, best read after completion of the book.
COMPARISONS TO MANTEL (AND GREGORY) – STYLE OF FIRST TWO THIRDS
And comparisons to Mantel’s book are inevitable – a book set in the 16th Century, featuring a famous Englishmen in an unfamiliar way, and written in a third person point of view present tense. A comparison made even more inevitable when the book’s opening lines include a confused child and the words “He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor” which to the reader immediately evokes Mantel's opening words of he trilogy “he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard” which follow the now-famous ”So now get up”.
There however the two books depart – both in subject matter and style.
Whereas Cromwell is the sole focus of Mantel’s book(s), so much so that the third party style is really as close as possible to a first party narrative; Shakespeare, while featuring as a point of view character, is very much a tertiary one (and in fact only ever referred to in indirect terms (the tutor, the husband, the father) , with the narrative initially started by his son Hamnet (twin to Judith) and largely sustained by his wife – Agnes (perhaps better know to us as Ann Hathaway).
With as an aside a throwaway line later in the book which links to almost all we know of her (via the reference in her husband’s will)
[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.
Agnes herself is portrayed as following her dead mother as something of a white witch/folk and natural healer/forest folk/mystical diviner.
I was inevitably reminded less of Mantel and more of that other great modern day chronicler of the Tudor Court – Philippa Gregory, and in particular her Cousins War series and particularly the character of Jacquetta of Luxembourg and her relationship with Elizabeth Woodville in “White Queen” and “Lady of the Rivers”. That is not to damn the book with faint praise, both books are excellent, but it was a little unexpected in a purely literary novel. Like Gregory, O'Farrell uses this as a way for a female to gain strong agency in a fundamentally patriarchal society (at least in this section we see that Anne's pregnancy, resulting marriage and even Will's move to London are all engineered by her).
And while Mantel’s tale sustains throughout a sense of immediacy, of imminent peril, of ever present danger in a court subject to the arbitrary caprices of a tyrant, for the first two thirds of the book, this is written in an indirect, very distanced style. The style of course reflects the character – not a necessarily paranoid man-of-the-world, painstakingly aware of the precariousness of his ascent and the multitude wishing his fall; but instead someone who is by their very identity other-worldly, possessed of both ancient knowledge and foresight and who therefore operates at a necessary remove from both the here and the now.
This style though does make the first two thirds of the book at times a rather too languid experience.
MIRRORING
One interesting break is a section where we trace the course of the plague
For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.
And this account is very cleverly mirrored a little later – in an account of the convoluted passage of a letter sent to Shakespeare telling him of Judith’s seemingly imminent death with even some small details mirrored (such as some unevenly balanced baskets).
Mirroring being a crucial theme of the book – with Judith and Hamnet as slightly odd twins (seemingly identical other than in their sex)
It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two
He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’
Ideas which the author expands into a plot point which of course draws on the use of mistaken identity and doubles in their father’s work:
Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.
MODERN DAY RESONANCE
Another fascinating aspect of this first section – which effectively leads up to the (real life) death of Hamnet – is the many accidental resonances with our present day situation, resonances which I suspect increase the already high chances of this book winning literary prize acclaim.
The way the plague spreads not just in England but also in Northern Italy (and the links between the two)
The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).
The inadequacy of Personal Protective Equipment for English medical staff:
It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’ ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says. ‘From the pestilence?’ His mother nods. ‘And will it?’ His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
Lockdowns
The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.
The guilty upside of the events for children of busy parents
If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.
Misplaced faith in unlikely treatments (hydroxychloroquin anyone?)
‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.
And the realisation that whatever contingency planning healers have done is powerless in the face of what they are confronted with
She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?
FINAL THIRD & GEORGE SAUNDERS
Any frustration at the slightly slow pace of the first parts, is really overcome in the final section, which deals with the aftermath of Hamnet’s death. Following on from Agnes’s realisation both that her healing powers were inadequate in the face of plague and that her foresight has actually mislead her and forced her to concentrate on the wrong risks (Judith rather than Hamnet) she is thrust back into the real world and the removal of time and place is taken away.
What we get instead is a fierce and painful examination of the grief of a mother and a more oblique examination of how that grief played out in the work of her husband.
Of the way it unmoors all of our pretensions to control
What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.
That includes a moving burial scene which cannot help remind the reader of another Booker winner - “Lincoln in the Bardo”
It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.
And then moves into helplessness
And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.
HAMNET AND HIS FATHER’S WORK
Agnes realises that rather than bringing her family together – her husband will instead move away from her and be absorbed in his work (her influence over him declining with her powers) – leaving her not so much for London but
‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’
That (and this was one of the inspirations for the writing of this book) that he will never reference plague directly in his work (as has already been noted by his daughter even in his speech)
It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.
That a playwright who gave so many words to the English language is not even available to help his family find the words that they need
What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?
But, in a tour de force ending to this excellent book that he will examine the death in his own way and via his most famous play.
Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the wa
Now published in paperback.
I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves). I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused, and how its consequences played out.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Women’s Prize - for which it has now been shortlisted.
I had already been drawn to it by: my enjoyment of other female-viewpoint retellings of connected events (such as “Silence of the Girls” and “Circe” – both of which I enjoyed); the author’s excellent chairing of the 2019 Booker shortlist readings.
The opening quote to my review sets out the basis of the book – and is spoken by Calliope (who Haynes believes must be the Muse in the opening line of Homer’s “Odyssey”) to Homer as she forces him to consider an alternative history. Homer is not actually named in Haynes’ text – just of course as the Muse is not named by Homer – and this small detail gets to the heart of Haynes’ aim here, which is to focus the story on the true (or at least equal) heroes of the Trojan War – the suffering women of Troy, the women of Greece waiting years for their husbands or sons to return. Even here, as the aside reference to Helen shows, she tries to give equal prominence to female characters mentioned only in passing in the classical sources as to those much better known.
The book skips between the stories of these characters – mainly told in a third party point of view style. There are also three sets of recurring chapters:
- Calliope’s comments on her interactions with the writer – which effectively serve as an opportunity for Haynes to review the previous set of chapter (since Calliope last spoke) and expand on her themes and ideas. These sections are in my view the strongest of the book
And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she? There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn. And for what reason? Too many men telling the stories of men to each other. Do they see themselves reflected in the glory of Achilles? Do their ageing bodies feel strong when they describe his youth? Is the fat belly of a feasted poet reminiscent of the hard muscles of Hector? The idea is absurd. And yet, there must be some reason why they tell and retell tales of men. If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?
- A progressive narrative “The Trojan Women” – Hecabe and her family (including Cassandra – who I found one of the most compelling characters) wait on the shore while Troy burns, as the Greeks divide their spoils (including the women and their children). These sections often serve to give a narrative structure to the story and to introduce/set up other chapters
- An epistolary series – Penelope’s unanswered letters to Odyssey, as she wonders why he has still not returned and recounts the stories she is hearing from the bards of his adventures and escapades. These sections are played somewhat for laughs, Penelope often incredulous at what she is hearing (despite it exactly matching the Odyssey as we know it – eg Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis). I found this a high risk strategy by Haynes: we know from her other work that she is a great believer in the Classics and in the importance of people reading them, but this approach seemed to me to run the risk of showing exactly why we should not read them, by pointing out their general preposterousness. And I think it’s a gamble which does not entirely pay off – I kept thinking that the author (a renowned comedian) would make more of these sections than she actually does.
The other chapters are largely self-contained chapters, focusing on one (or a small number of) characters - these characters include Greeks, Trojans, recent Gods (the Aphrodite, Hera, Athene chapter on The Judgment of Paris is a particular strong point and a favourite of the authors) and the more ancient Gods (Haynes subscribes to the theory that Eris’s missed-wedding induced insertion of a golden apple designed to create her signature strife between the three aforementioned Godesses, was actually a plot by Themis and Zeus – of course in her telling the invention of the former).
Three asides here:
- This latter story matches the opening quote – tracing back the cause of the war, past Paris’s abduction of Helen, back via the Judgement of Paris, via the actions of Eris to their really originating cause. The book also goes many years past the war in the story of Andromache.
- In what I think is pretty-well the only area where Haynes departs from any classical source (although even here I may be incorrect and have just not found the reference) and adds instead more of a deliberate contemporary/topical link Themis and Zeus are motivated by the need to thin out the ranks of mankind as Gaia is finding it too hard to carry the weight of mankind and their expansion
- When deciding how to kill of some of mankind, and in what is clearly a completely accidental topical link, Themis and Zeus reject plague as
“Too inexact. Sometimes it just picks off the old, who would be dead soon anyway”
The issue with these chapters though is that due both to their sheer number and brevity, I feel that in many cases the author does not really capture the voice or character of the chapter’s subject. Too many of the chapters I felt ended up reading like expanded Wikipedia entries, running through the basic story, and often to be honest just recounting the more normal men’s story just observed by a woman. Two classic cases (and which link to other recent books) are:
- The chapter on Briseis and Chryseis, which almost reads like a plot summary of “The Silence of The Girls” but without the latter’s clever deliberate anachronisms (although also without its misjudged switch to male viewpoint).
- The chapter on Iphengia (which echoes the opening of Colm Toibin’s “House of Names”) in which we wait to see how the horror of her fate gradually unfolds on her, only to find its in a single paragraph
And then she saw the glint of her father’s knife in the morning sun and she understood everything in a rush, as though a god had put the words into her mind. The treacherous stillness in the air was divinely sent. Artemis had been affronted by something her father had done, and now she demanded a sacrifice or the ships would not sail. So there would be no marriage, no husband for Iphigenia. Not today and not ever.
Overall I think this book works very well as a female-centric survey of and intrroduction to the Greek legends – and hence I think succeeds exactly on the basis on which it was formulated and written. I was less convinced of it as a piece of literature and would rank behind both Pat Barker and Madeline Miller’s books which were longlisted for last year’s prize – it was nevertheless enjoyable.
And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them.
My thanks to Picador for an ARC via NetGalley....more
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Women's Prize - a prize for which it has now been shortlisted.
Other than a brief prologue, the boI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Women's Prize - a prize for which it has now been shortlisted.
Other than a brief prologue, the book is set in 1965 and written in a simple first person present tense, the narrator a fifteen year old (Ana) from a family in the Dominican countryside. Her older sister already hooked up to a local without prospects, Ana accepts her mother’s instructions to accept a proposal of marriage from Juan (who with his brothers is something of a local big-shot – with connections, a nascent restaurant in the Capital and with frequent trips to New York).
Ana’s mother’s has a clear strategy for Ana: move to New York where she will join Juan in his more prosperous life there; insist, using her feminine wiles and determination, on education, the opportunity to start her own business, money to send back to her family; pave the way for the rest of the family to join her and live the American dream.
The reality is somewhat different – both in Juan’s circumstances (he lives in a run-down apartment, flits between various unsecure jobs and illegal moneymaking schemes) and in Ana’s ability to execute the plans (she is quickly cowed into a resentful submission by Juan’s forcefulness and by her own lack of confidence founded around her inability to speak English and lack of knowledge of American society and New York geography – an inability and lack of knowledge Juan is keen to maintain as it gives him greater power over her).
When Juan’s force turns to violence, Ana who has been finding ways to save small amounts of money herself plans an escape back home, but is persuaded to stay by Juan’s darker-skinned, easy-going brother Cesar (particularly as they realise she is pregnant). Juan returns to the Dominican Republic to try to sort out his affairs leaving Ana finally free, with the encouragement of Cesar, to explore the City and learn the language and begin to form her own life as well as, more dangerously, her own attachment to Cesar.
Later Ana’s mother is able to travel to America and the strongest scenes of the book I think are when she first arrives and is cowed by unfamiliarity and her sadness as she realises the realities of Ana’s life in America and the sacrifices she has made.
All of this plays out against two backgrounds.
The first and most immediate is personal to Ana: her pregnancy, Juan’s trials in Dominica and the prospect of his return, and the increasing pressure from Ana’s mother to facilitate the wider family’s passage to American. Ana herself always has to juggle her own wants and ambitions against her family responsibilities.
The second is events in the wider world:
The Assassination of Malcolm X (which rather coincidentally takes place almost on Ana’s doorstep) and the events leading up to and around the 1965 Civil Rights Act (this leads to the Dominicans discussing their own interactions with black rights activists – are they a fellow minority or in some ways interlopers on a historical struggle for freedom; as well as bringing out the racism inherent in Dominican society itself – the advancement of those like Juan with lighter skin)
The First American troops in Vietnam: this takes away the husband of Juan’s love, his relationship with her and her frequent calls to their home (silent when Ana answers) cast a poison over what Juan and Ana’s already limited relationship. Further of course the American controversy over their troops presence in Asia is contrasted with indifference to their presence in Dominica that year, intervening in the Civil War which calls of all Juan’s plans into doubt and claims the life of Ana’s younger brother
The Beatles first stadium concert, the Immigration bill (stopping national quotas and we know now the start of increased Hispanic migration), The New York World fair (where Ana and Cesar try and fail to make a fortune selling unofficial snacks but gain a glimpse of a future world), events in Baseball and the fall of a Dominican hero (https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/1...)
This is overall a fairly simple tale and in many ways a familiar one – its difference I think largely stemming from the concentration on Dominican immigrants.
For me the strongest aspect was around the importance of language teaching – a Nun giving English language to an assortment of immigrants plays a crucial role in Ana developing some confidence and freedom.
It is I think interesting that its mainly right wing, immigration-sceptical politicians who emphasise the need for language learning to aid assimilation (or testing to act as a barrier to entry) and yet what the book shows (and what I have also seen recently) is that a lack of language teaching can be discriminatory to female immigrants, particularly those from (even) more patriarchal societies where the women can end up largely helpless and housebound.
My thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Last night I had the pleasure to watch the stage version (having seen the first two plays some years back) - Mantel’s ability to adapt her work for thLast night I had the pleasure to watch the stage version (having seen the first two plays some years back) - Mantel’s ability to adapt her work for the stage only adds to my appreciation of this brilliant final part of a triumphant trilogy. It also shows her ability to extract and condense the novel (which demands - possibly over demands - patience, knowledge and interest to extract its considerable rewards) for a different medium.
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Simply magnificent – in my view the strongest of a Trilogy whose first two volumes were among the most deserving winners in Booker history.
A book which shines a light into history and in doing so holds up a mirror to our present day.
Last Winter, a group of colleagues from around the world visited the UK for an internal conference in Windsor and in a break from the formal proceedings we took a trip to Windsor Castle. One of the many interesting parts of the Tour for me was St George’s Hall – and its ceiling studied with the coats of arms of every Knight of the Garter since its foundation in 1348. I say every Knight – but in fact some of the shields are numbered but blank – these I was told represent Knights expelled from the order (in the early days typically accompanied by execution), and I enjoyed conversing with one of the guides asking which Knight each shield represented and seeing if I could identify the reason for their expulsion. I particularly remember a conversation around the Earl of Monmouth and how his expulsion for trying to overthow a King who only a few years later was overthrown to popular acclaim, was itself a perfect example of revolution (in the true and original meaning of the word) and the wheel of fortune.
One of the shields of course represents Thomas Cromwell (his election by the King into the order being one of the high points both of this book and Cromwell’s career; if in some ways designed to legitimized Cromwell’s being effectively made the King’s Uncle with the marriage of Gregory to Lady Ughtred (the Queen’s widowed Sister).
And the idea of Cromwell as something of a blank canvas is one which partly lies at the heart of the conception of this fabulous trilogy – Mantel writing what must rank as one of the greatest character studies of all time, of a character who as his biographer Diarmaid MacCullough says is elusive even for a historian due to what he believes to be “deliberate destruction .. [when] Cromwell’s household heard of his arrest .. they began a systematic process of destroying the out-tray of his principle archive”. The result is that “amid the torrent of paperwork through which the conscientious biographer wades to recapture what is left of Thomas Cromwell, the man’s own voice is largely missing”. He then goes on to say “Hilary Mantel has sensitively captured this quality in Thomas Cromwell’s archive in her novels: her Cromwell is pre-eminently an observer, even of himself, not ‘I’ but ‘he’”.
But in a different way Cromwell is not a blank canvas at all. Any historian writes with the background of previous biographers (as well as other historians who have included Cromwell – often far from sympathetically – in wider accounts of this pivotal period in not just English, but World history”. And any novelist writes similarly on top of previous fictional realisations of Cromwell – perhaps most notably the pro-More, anti-Cromwell account of “A Man of All Season”, an account which I can only comment seems to make as a hero a man who died in an attempt to ensure common Englishmen could not read the Gospel (and was canonised as a result).
So this trilogy is not just a novel but a palimpsest – and in this last section of the trilogy Mantel brings the idea of history being re-written, re-evaluated but always in a way which can only imperfectly erase previous versions out explicitly.
We have for example:
- The frequent references to the devices of the fallen Queens and their intertwined initials with Henry’s, needing constant repainting;
- Cromwell’s interrogation taking place in a room he decorated “for Anne Boleyn to lodge before her coronation. It was he who reglaxed them, and ordered the godesses on the walls; who had their eyes changed from brown to blue when Jane Seymour came in”;
- As the book nears its end Cromwell first due to the strictures of fever and then his imminent death, revisits his life story
- Mantel accompanies the reader on a revisit of the previous two volumes – in one bravura section of only 2-3 pages we have both the opening and closing sentences of “Wolf Hall” repeated; we also get the full story behind the opening and the young Cromwell’s escape abroad
- And Cromwell is very conscious of it as he attempts to re-model England:
“Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through…”
- And finally this idea that history is written in layers, is the reason why this fabulous trilogy is so vital – and despite its historical fiction nature, of far greater relevance to today’s world than the supposedly more contemporary fiction that surrounds us.
While reading the trilogy (a third re-read of the first volume, a second re-read of the second) I came across the following quote in the New Statesman taken from a letter written to Machiavelli (a contemporary of Cromwell and whose book increasingly features as the trilogy progresses)
“I earnestly believe that only men's faces and the outwards aspect of things change, while the same things reoccur again and again. Thus we are witnessing events that happened earlier. But the alteration in names and outward aspects is such that only the most learned are able to recognise them. That is why history is a useful and profitable discipline, because it shows you and allows you to recognise what you've never seen and experienced"
Since the trilogy started we have had the following:
Brexit – and the divides both without and within Europe, Nick Timothy/Fiona Hill/Dominic Cummings, #metoo, Trump, Covid-19, Fake News, Austerity
My view was that the main themes of this trilogy, are the following areas of the 16th Century:
- Swings in Britain’s relationships with Europe, tension between the countries in Britain on that topic, shifting power blocs in Continental Europe itself
- The North-South divide of the Pilgrimage of Grace
- Advisors and councillors to leaders – their rise, fall and their emnities
- Sexual harassment and belittling and subjugation of women
- Braggart leaders with self esteem issues emerging in fiery denunciations of their critics
- Plagues hitting London
- Manipulation of news sources, propaganda and debates around what is true and what isn’t
- Government spending cuts impacting on the poor and the tension with the well off as to whether they should support the less fortunate
Just an example: Interesting for those of us in the UK in late May to reflect on what happens when an advisor (on whom a leader completely relies for political judgment and did his European policy) alienates large parts of the country including the people, powerful Bishops and other politicians - and then behaves in a way which both outraged them further and gives them an opening to being him down. No Rose Garden press conference here more an interrogation in the the Tower by the agents of the Tudor Rose.
Interesting for those of us in the UK this weekend to reflect on what happens when an advisor (on whom a leader completely relies for political judgment and did his European policy) alienates large parts of the country including the people, powerful Bishops and other politicians - and then behaves in a way which both outraged them further and gives them an opening to being him down. No Rose Garden press conference here more an interrogation in the the Tower by the agents of the Tudor Rose. If only Cromwell had thought to explain his fondness for sourcing Lutheran texts as just to help with checking his eyesight. only Cromwell had thought to explain his fondness for sourcing Lutheran texts as just to help with checking his eyesight.
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ORIGINAL NOTES
I attended an event at the Royal Festival Hall tonight to launch the book.
The evening started with two of the actors from the TV series reading first from Wolf Hall and then Bring Up The Bodies.
Then Hilary Mantel read the opening part of The Mirror and The Light.
She then had a long, detailed and very informative interview with the journalist Alex Clark and finished the evening by reading almost the end of the book (p866 if you have a written copy).
A few points I found of interest and remembered (I did not take notes so I missed much more):
On the length of the book: she emphasised that readers were not reviewers - they did not need to rush to finish the book in 48 hours so they could write a review. (Some on Goodreads may disagree!!). In particular the book is deliberately set out in five main parts (before the closing Mirror and Light chapters dealing respectively with Cromwell’s death and execution). Each of the parts is in three sections (mirroring the trilogy) and structured with an arc something like a novel. In other words she is encouraging people to read one section at a time.
While writing the book she was in regular dialogue with Diarmaid MacCullouch and the biography he was writing. I read they biography earlier on the year and it sounds like it is an ideal companion as they used many of the same sources.
Intriguingly she mentioned that all six wives feature in the book (I was unclear if book in this context meant The Mirror and The Light or the three volumes - she said elsewhere in the evening that she often talks about “the book” and even “Wolf Hall” meaning all three of the novels as separately published). In particular she said that the sixth wife (Catherine Parr) is in The Mirror and The Light and “not all readers will find her but you will be very pleased with yourself if you do”. So there is a challenge! UPDATE- a fairly easy one by most accounts.
The writing of the plays had a big impact on her - in particular realising the importance of placement in a scene reflecting the power dynamics and of how and where dialogue is spoken changing its meaning. The influence of this involvement (which happened after the first two books were published) changed the way she wrote this third book. Often when starting a scene / idea she would imagine how she would write it if she had two actors on a stage and two pieces of dialogue and then expand it from there.
She still regards her most impressive achievement as explaining the French East India Company scandal in “A Place of Greater Safety” and when faced with difficulties in this book with how to represent difficult ideas (which were more common here than in the first two volumes) she reminded herself that “you are the woman who ....)
She regards her rewriting of the historical consensus verdict on Cromwell as a bad man, as a long overdue correction to an incorrect view perpetuated in secondary sources and which did not stand up when going back to primary sources.
From writing the books she has gained a profound respect for those who fought for the reformation and the Gospel in England and has come on a journey much closer to a faith herself.
The book is full of references back to images, ideas and scenes in the first two books. “Every character has its arc. Every pigeon comes home to roost”. The night before she finished the book she did not sleep as she felt all of the characters coming back to her demanding she accounted for completing their journey. The next morning went she went down her picture of Henry VIII had fallen from her wall, which have her the sense that The character of Cromwell had our survived even Henry and gave her the impetus to write the closing chapter (which was “more of an assembly job” as she had already written it in pieces).
From the first conception of the book she had always imagined it bookended with the “So now get up”....more
I joined a Radio 4 Book Club virtual discussion of Jenny Offill’s 2014 second novel “Dept of Speculation” (Now shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize.
I joined a Radio 4 Book Club virtual discussion of Jenny Offill’s 2014 second novel “Dept of Speculation” (shortlisted for the Folio Prize); and, this, her third novel “Weather” appeared on a number of 2020-preview lists.
This book is very much in the style of Dept. of Speculation – which I described in my review of that book as an elliptical and aphoristic style.
Offil said in many interviews around Dept. of Speculation that she enjoys wandering the non-fiction aisles of university libraries, pulling books and random, and noting any facts which catch her interest and she can use in her books.
Here she embraces that idea by making her main character a University librarian.
Lizzie gets a side job supporting her ex research supervisor - a climate change podcaster Sylvia. She accompanies her to summits and meetings, meeting the super-rich and their response to the climate emergency, a world of rewilding, technological singularity, transhumanism, floating cities, geo-engineering. She also answers her emails and post, which in turn introduces her to a different approach to the same topic – the world of survival hacks, doomsteads, doomsday preppers.
Lizzie’s marriage falters a little – due to her excessive involvement (at one stage she takes an “enmeshment” test) with the life of her addict brother, which takes a more dramatic turn as he struggles with being a new-father. Her insistence on taking on the burden of her brother, is I think reflected in her views on climate change – taking on the burdens of the human race.
“I let my brother choose the movie for once, but then it’s so stupid I can barely watch it. In the movies he likes there is always some great disaster about to happen and only one unlikely person who can stop it.”
And climate change, in keeping with the book’s style is addressed elliptically and aphoristically, some examples:
First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not coral
It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.
My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay
Of the anthropological driver of climate change:
Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer. You don’t say.
Of her own attempts to process the emergency:
The disaster psychologist explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.
Of the difficulty of understanding the time frame over which climate change is emerging:
A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”
It seems almost impossible to review this book – without comparing and contrasting it to Lucy Ellmans’s Goldsmith Prize winning, Booker shortlisted “Ducks, Newburyport”.
Both feature an American female wife and mother as a narrator, both focus almost obsessively on environmental issues, on the election of Trump and what the two together say about modern America, both obsessed that this is the worst-of-times (in direct contradiction to almost every possible statistical measure that can be used), both mix the profound with the mundane, both interleave trivia with domesticity and with world events.
However whereas Ellmann has a comprehensive, all-inclusive, stream-of-consciousness style, representing the narrator’s though process, with nothing edited or filtered; by contrast Offill’s style is all about the filter and edit – it is a book which has been edited down to almost nothing, where much of the action takes place in the spaces between paragraphs.
I am not clear which book I enjoyed the most. This is a much easier and more intellectually stimulating read, but also a more ephemeral and insubstantial one.
Why only four stars. My disconnect with this book, as with Ducks, Newburyport ultimately I think comes down to the narrator’s (and I assume author’s) worldview, which in its despair lacks a faith in the future that I feel. In “Weather” in particular this is captured in a dismissal of a profound challenge (which in the appendix is correctly assigned to John Piper) with a curt “Yup”. And that unfortunately is a “Nope” to a fifth star.
My thanks to Granta Publications for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given itNow shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given its closing words
this is about being together
A book I have read and loved three times so I was delighted to be present for its win and to get these photos
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When hearing the winner announcement I immediately thought of a passage very early in the book when it says
Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it"
At the Foyles/New Statesman Booker Winner reading on the Thursday of the award I asked the author if she had also reflected on that passage when the announcement was made and how it applied to her own situation.
Her answer was: that she had in fact been reflecting on it for some time (including when she was completing the book), but crucially that when she first started writing the book she did not think it was true for her at all - she did not expect any positive reception from the mainstream as she did not think it had moved far enough or the book would be seen as topical enough. However the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements shifted the ground significantly in her view and meant that the mainstream was ready for a black woman writing about black women.
MAIN REVIEW
The book is written as a series of twelve chapters, each featuring a named character.
These characters are Black (although in one case not aware), British (although in one case no longer thinking of themselves as such) and Female (although in one case no longer identifying as such)
They are however of different age, sexuality and sexual identity, formative experience, family unit structure (both parental unit and their own family unit), ethnic make-up, ancestral origin, shade, region, occupation, cultural background, class, and degree of activism (as well as journey along the activist/conventional spectrum over time).
This is a novel of polyphony, polygenetics, polygenderism.
But crucially it was not one that at any time I felt was a forced attempt to represent diversity but more of a natural attempt to examine the core shared identity of the characters alongside their differences and their journey; and more crucially an attempt to give visibility to black British women in literature.
The author has described the style she chose to adopt here as “fusion fiction” – a fluid form of prose poetry, with a dearth of conventional sentences with capital letter openings and full stop endings
I found this style very effective – form matching content, style matching theme. Evaristo has always been someone who challenges convention in art (as captured in Amma – the most autobiographical of the characters). The fluidity of the prose enables her to range within the characters thoughts and across time, and between stories and characters.
The characters are grouped in four sets of three – with clear and immediate links between the characters in each set, but less obvious and emerging links between the characters in different sets.
The first set has Amma (a provocative theatre director), her daughter Yazz (studying literature at the UEA) and Dominique (now based in the US but at Amma’s original partner in disrupting theatrical culture).
The second Carole (who pulled herself from difficult origins, via a Maths degree at Oxford to a banking job in the City), Bummi (her mother) and La Tisha (her one time schoolfriend now working in a supermarket as a young Mum of three children by three absent fathers).
The third has Shirley (a friend of Amma’s since school, now veteran teacher whose greatest project as a teacher was Carole), Shirley’s mother Winsome (now retired in Barbados) and Penelope (a now retired colleague of Shirley’s who resented the increasing multi-culturalism of their school for many years, while secretly struggling with finding out on her 16th birthday she was a foundling).
The last has non-binary Megan/Morgan (they are a social media influencer and activist), Hattie (their great-grandmother, a 90-something Northumberland farmer) and Grace (Hattie’s mother).
Thee are only the main characters though and Evaristo also brings in the backstories of their parents, their closest friends and even the parents of their closest friends.
She has said in an interview ”At one point I thought maybe I could have one hundred protagonists. Toni Morrison has a quote: ‘Try to think the unthinkable’. That’s unthinkable. One hundred black women characters? How can I do that? I need a more poetic form. Now there are only twelve main characters.” and while adopting the poetic form the novel still retains strong elements of her centurion ambitions.
And the backstories are important I believe in what the author is trying to achieve. From the same interview: ”Even though I don’t have a protagonist who’s a young teenager, a lot of the characters went through that stage. So you have a sense of who they were as children, how they became adults, and then how they are as mothers. I’m deeply interested in how we become the people we are. Coming from a radical feminist alternative community in my 20s, and then seeing these people in their 40s and 50s, I’ve seen people become extremely, almost, conservative, establishment, having lost all the free-spiritedness, oppositionality and rebelliousness of their younger years. To me that’s fascinating. When I meet young people today and they are a certain way, I think: ‘You don’t know who you’re going to be.’ That feeds into the fiction. How do we parent our children? What are our ambitions for our children? How does that link to how we were raised? How does gender play out?”
Amma is perhaps also the most central character - and it is in the after-party on the opening night of her first play at the National Theatre “The Last Amazon of Dahomey”, that the various characters and their stories converge and interact (Carole as her partner is a sponsor of the National, Morgan invited to review the play by tweet for example).
A final epilogue reveals a final link via an examination of hybridity of origins and finishes with the quote with which I open my review.
I found this a strong novel – there is polemic and challenge, but also warmth, humour and self-awareness.
Carol’s idea of bed-time reading includes
“also monitoring the international news that affects market conditions, the weather conditions that affect crops, the terrorism that destabilizes countries, the elections that effect trading agreements, the natural disasters that can wipe out whole industries”
which could simply not be closer to my own work-related reading, but she also comments
“and if it isn’t related to work, it’s not worth reading”
which could simply not be further from my own view of literature – and a book like this is why wider reading is worthwhile.
At the after-party we are told:
a five-star review has already been uploaded online from one usually savage pit-bull of a critic who’s been uncharacteristically gushing: astonishing, moving, controversial, original
Well as my profile picture shows I am more Golden Retriever (incidentally one such Humperdinck features as Penelope’s loyal companion – “always there for her, always eagle for a cuddle, who’ll listen to her for hours without interruption .. greets her as soon as she steps in the door”) than savage pit-bull of a critic (although I have my moments) but five stars from me....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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