If you would like to read what Hilary Mantel made of Robocop, then I have the book for you. But if you’re looking for a memoir, as you might expect given the title, then you are out of luck. This is a collection of essays, lectures and journalism (Mantel spent four years as the Spectator’s film critic, hence Robocop). To the extent that it is a memoir of Mantel, it is a memoir of her mind, how she thought and how she wrote.
Her death at the age of 70 last September still feels like a tragedy. Open the pages of this book and that feeling hardens into certainty. What a talent we lost. Her sentences leap off the page, her range is exceptional. Here she is in New York’s main train station: “The market at Grand Central displayed American plenitude: transparent caskets of juicy berries, plump with a dusky purple bloom; pyramids of sushi; sheets of aged steak, lolling in its blood.”
There’s cricket (“its prevailing note is elegiac”), the process of writing (“turning life into ink”), and Kate Moss’s perfume Velvet Hour (“a medieval theologian, had he possessed one of Kate’s tacky-looking blue flasks could have used it to explain sin — so warm for the first half-hour, and afterwards so banal”).
Readers who know Mantel from her great Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall et al) may be surprised at this range. Others will not. Her talent spanned the spectre-haunted Beyond Black (probably her best single novel), her memoir Giving Up The Ghost, other novels like Fludd, and the stunning A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution. Her slightly duff notes, like Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, a novel about Saudia Arabia, were rare indeed.
In A Memoir of My Former Self, her distinctive style and preoccupations are everywhere. There are ghosts aplenty, bodies, illnesses, babies and meditations on the continual conversation between present and past.
There is no quarter given to anyone, or anything. “Heaven knows I’m glad to see the back of Thomas More,” she writes of her Tudor novels. “I couldn’t bundle him to the scaffold quickly enough.” Secondhand bookshops come briefly between her crosshairs. Some grubby ones, Mantel writes, “would feel as if they stocked archaic diseases, as well as unwanted books: upstairs for Poetry and the Black Death”.
In the course of an essay on stationery (she had a surprising affinity with ring binders), renowned writers like Bruce Chatwin and Ernest Hemingway are dispatched with brutal ease for liking Moleskines. “Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers?”. She made much of this cutting style, and often wove the sharpness into her images. Mantel re-imagines Princess Diana in Paris “not dead at all, but slid into the Alma tunnel to re-emerge in the autumn of 1997, collar turned up, long feet like blades carving through the rain”.
This is still Mantel. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do
You never waste a moment reading Hilary Mantel. Unfortunately, at times this collection comes closer than most to testing the truth of that. If you haven’t read the authors Mantel is writing about or seen the films she reviews, it can be tricky to sustain interest. The collection also compares unfavourably with Mantel Pieces (2020), an assortment of her London Review of Books pieces. That has Royal Bodies (which kicked off a tabloid storm in 2013 for lines about the now Princess of Wales). It also contains emails and notes from the author (typos included) which added a personal touch that is lacking here, in a book that titles itself as a memoir.
Yet this is still Mantel. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do. Just have a look at Robocop: “It provides a stimulating evening for those who can jettison the ‘cultural baggage’; and a pure delight for those of us who have never had any culture at all.”
Robbie Smith is comment editor and literary editor
