![]() ![]() ![]() In several stories, irksome male interlopers appear-ominous figures who aren’t the young girl’s father, nor her mother’s husband. ![]() At four o’clock the daylight would almost have vanished, sucked away into the dark sky our wellingtons squelched in the mud and dead leaves, and breath hung like disaster in the raw air.” “But it is not spring that I remember: rather those days when the lights were on by eleven o’clock, and wet roofs and the mill chimneys shivered behind a curtain of water. The seven stories are all told in a first-person (mostly female) voice of an adult looking back on pivotal moments in childhood, set against an industrial urban backdrop and within the world of a highly unorthodox nuclear family.Īll the stories here are closely observed, showcasing the author’s exemplary skill at painting secondary characters with a simple literary flourish: “Myra was little, she was mere, rat-faced and meager, like a nameless cut in a butcher’s window in a demolition area.”Īlso, Mantel reliably locates the right sensory details to evoke a childhood disrupted by arcane family dynamics and the ambition to escape provincial life in the North of England. Mantel’s new story collection, Learning to Talk (published here for the first time, originally in the UK in 2013) has a much narrower focus-that is, a troubled Catholic childhood in and around the village of Derbyshire in the North of England in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ![]() The trilogy’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is as fully rendered as any fictional character in modern times, and these epic works are wonderful to read from first page to last. So successful is this behemoth work that one reads The Mirror & the Light (the last novel in the series, coming in at a mere 700 pages) with the same page-turning fervor as Wolf Hall, and its successor, Bring Down the Bodies. Somehow Mantel contrived to break (or reinvent) the code for this genre, transforming the hoary conventions of novels set during the reign of King Henry VIII into narratives with a contemporary point of view superbly suited to our latter-day sensibilities. Let’s be clear right from the start: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy stands at the apex of historical fiction in the 21 st century. ![]()
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