Mantel Pieces: The New Book from The Sunday Times Best Selling Author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

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Anderson's book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna's wedding was different from other people's. In her essay on Britain's Last Witch, she describes the life of Helen Duncan, a psychic imprisoned in Royal Holloway for divulging state secrets from The Other Side.⠀ In both women, Mantel recognises how much the dead follow the living around & that to be alive is to be haunted. Her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, explores this in respect to her own life & draws out her other great preoccupation: bodies & how they limit our world. ⠀ Her awareness of her own body makes her acutely aware of others, as when she considers the ill health of Henry VIII. "Historians &, I'm afraid, doctors, underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper & wear away both the personality and the intellect."⠀

Mantel Pieces: The New Book from The Sunday Times Best

These essays are culled from Mantel’s semi-regular contributions to the London Review of Books over a period of many years. Most are based on books she’s reviewing, chosen because they’re of interest to her for one reason or another. The story of a medium prosecuted for being a witch—in the 1940s—greatly interests Mantel, and so interested me, especially as it turns into an indictment of the type of people (gender- and class-wise) deemed guilty. The debilitating pain of her endometriosis was initially treated with antipsychotics & then abdominal surgery that left her infertile, treated with steroids that transformed her body. ⠀ There is, therefore, a temptation to write afterthoughts into these pieces, to embellish them with later and better thinking. I have not done that, but left them as they were--mantelpieces littered with to-do lists, and messages form people I used to be.” From the IntroductionThe most famous essay in this collection of pieces that Mantel wrote from the London Review of Books is Mantel’s “Royal Bodies”. The response to this essay was in part anger, in particular because of a description of Kate Middleton that describes as a “jointed doll on which certain rags are hung . . . a shop-window mannequin with no personality of her own, entirely define by what she wore” (269) and “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish” (271) and perhaps most damningly “What does Kate read? It’s a question” (271).

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Sublime, as you'd expect. What is new, however, is that when she sinks her teeth into a subject, she's brutal: “Our heroine is charmless, foul-mouthed [...] We know that in this film we are seeing the real Madonna - for we know from her other films that she cannot act”. The essays that shine through all focalise on misogyny - the infamous Royal Bodies, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and Britain's Last Witch; she takes figures of history who have been mythologised, and dissects the phallocentric iconography that has warped their image. And as someone who is still haunted by periods of physical and mental ill health, Meeting The Devil is the essay that lingers in my mind with a spectral quality. She writes about the visceral and mental aspects of pain so well: In my Catholic childhood, I had a fascination with the stories of women who became Catholic saints, so the essay on "holy anorexia" found its perfect audience. Her piece on the way “royal bodies” are viewed and treated by the public and the media is forceful. I will never read most of the twenty books that make up the substance of Mantel Pieces but that doesn’t matter. Each review is a little jewel in itself - exhaustively researched and written in clean, lucid prose. The Hair Shirt Sisterhood – on women saints and suffering. I was reminded a little of The Nun’s Tale by Candace Robb here, probably because of the description of how some of these women sought out suffering Overall, what I enjoyed most was her approach to writing about history, summed up for me in these two quotes:The Murder of James Bulger – what does a murder and the children’s crusade have in common? The question ‘at what age are children responsible for the things they do, especially the horrific things they sometimes do’. Marie Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. I am a big fan of Mantel's writing, although as a writer I am constantly depressed by her with the ever present thought of "how does she write so brilliantly" coupled with the knowledge I won't write anything as good. I think this book is really for the hard core fans rather than just anyone who likes her Wolf Hall trilogy or other works. It consists on selected writing from the London Review of books which she is a frequent reviewer for - including her essay Royal Bodies which caused quite a stir a few years ago, (although for those of a calmer disposition with relation to anything to do with royalty it is hard to see why).