In 2017 Hilary Mantel opened her first of five Reith lectures by quoting St Augustine. “St Augustine says the dead are invisible, they are not absent,” she said, and then added, “You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that that’s true”. I am not sure if Mantel herself believed in actual ghosts – one can scarcely imagine her cowering at the foot of a bed in terror in the middle of the night, although she was brought up Catholic – but she undeniably believed in the power of history to manifest itself as a sort of psychological haunting. Certainly, no writer better depicted the past as though it were a continuous shapeshifting present than she did in her groundbreaking Wolf Hall trilogy. Her magnificent telling of the story of Henry VIII from behind the eyes of his inscrutable right-hand man Thomas Cromwell made her the first – and still only – woman to twice win the Booker Prize. It also made a generation of readers feel they were right inside Cromwell’s head with him.
The literary world is reeling from the sudden, shocking death of Mantel, and rightly so. I can’t think of many authors who have delivered sentence after sentence of complex pleasure while simultaneously producing chapter after chapter of heart-racing action the way she did in the Wolf Hall trilogy. She regarded those three novels, which took her 15 gruelling years to write, as her life’s work. Like many of her previous neglected works of fiction, they exemplified her belief in history as best understood not as a series of facts or even events but as a subjective sequence of hallucinatory, almost subconscious experience. Ghosts are everywhere for Cromwell in these three novels – be it his father beating his childhood self to a pulp on the streets of Putney; Anne Boleyn, whose execution he engineered, picking up her head and chasing him through the corridors of Whitehall; or the recent past itself, in the form of an unquiet spectre forever pressing down on him. Throughout he is haunted, also, by the prospect of his own untimely death at the hands of a volatile and capricious king. We know it is only a matter of time. He does, too.
