Chapter Three - Of What Is Passing: Present-Tense Narration

Summary

Simultaneous Narration

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light

Joseph Brooker expressed a commonly held view when he called Hilary Mantel (1952–2022) “the most celebrated writer of historical fiction in Britain” in the twenty-first century (2015: 173). By that time, Mantel had published the first two novels of her Tudor trilogy, both of which were awarded the Booker Prize. More adulations followed on the completion of her third instalment in 2020 (cf. Rex 2020: 56). Sidestepping the issue of the past's essential unreachability, Mantel sets out to reconstruct the past plausibly in the realm of fiction and is determined to subordinate the fictional to the factual. Brooker praises the writer's depth of historical knowledge and the extensive research on which her reconstruction of the Tudor period is based (2015: 174). In the words of Lisa Fletcher, “the picture of the past offered by these weighty novels is one of plenitude rather than absence or lack” (2017: 40). As Renate Brosch observes, in Mantel's novels postmodern scepticism towards historical truth has been muted and metafictionality has been eschewed (2017: 165–166).

In keeping with Georg Lukacs's directive (1963: 40), Mantel's self-professed aim is to “recreate the texture of lived experience” (Mantel 2017b: 3), yet, in an obvious departure from his recommendation, she focuses on prominent historical personages rather than “mediocre” or “middle-of-the-road heroes” (Lukács 1963: 36–37). Frank Ankersmit once warned against the pitfalls and constraints of choosing famous figures as literary characters:

Writing a historical novel around a well-known and important historical personality is asking for trouble. For then the application of a historical representation's represented aspects of the past to a person is likely to be complicated by facts about that person that the historical novelist will have to respect. It can be done, but it's awkward, and one would rather avoid these complications. (2010: 45)