Losing Hilary Mantel

I read An Experiment in Love at university. I found it gripping, but it released me as soon as I finished it and never reached for me again. I read Fludd and found it mildly engaging, but again, it kept no particular place in my mind or memory. Being repulsed by its subject, I never went near Beyond Black. Then I read Wolf Hall.

Its effect on me, as on the world, was electric. It was an apparition. A comet. ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ All the superlatives reviewers bestowed were justified. It was beyond anything we could have hoped for: from this author — from any author. Its two sequels bestrode the literary world at the same latitudes, the same altitude. Heights no others would even attempt, let alone accomplish as she did. Immaculate world-building, each thread and fibre held at the precise tension to make the pictures true — in both senses. Lives plucked from the dust of the past and animated with minds, moods, expressions, energies, quirks; unfolding in rooms or gardens or woods — ‘acres of England’ laid out in ‘leafy shires’ — where wood and stone and fire, fur, silk, linen, leather, and parchment, give every scene lustre and fragrance, as well as verity. The whole thing stitched to history with strong but secret stitches. Sustained brilliance across some two thousand pages. They were — are — prodigies.

They deserved all the praise. They all deserved the prizes (though, inexplicably, Lee Child stood like a troll on a bridge between them and the Booker trifecta). She wrote them at the height of her powers, and thank God she lived to do it, given the pain and ill-health she lived with so long. She mastered her art, and made her masterpiece, and now she’s gone.

What we’ve lost is not more masterworks (there might have been no more), nor more heights of power or accomplishment, but her way of seeing the world. Her mind and eye, at work together. We keep the work, but we’ve lost the only person capable of such work. The work is miraculous, but we’ve lost the miracle of just that person, that portal, where this idea, this desire, apprehension, aptitude and achievement coincided. She made worlds, but she was a world — as all of us are — and the world she was is now extinct. She once said that these Cromwell books might be the thing she could have done that nobody else could have done. In the wake of her death, they look all the more singular (in the way a supernova is singular). All the more wondrous, given how fragile and contingent, how mortal, we now know her life to have been. I suppose this is true of any death. ‘And blue-bleak embers… Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.’