Hilary Mantel - Slowing Down History

Two-hundred pages into Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, the French Revolution ignites. Unsurprisingly, so does her novel. Robespierre is taking on Mirabeau, the people are taking to the streets, and the Bastille is set to topple. This isn’t to say that up until now the novel has been dull, but rather - and this is reminiscent of Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall trilogy - there is a lot of growing and waiting to be got through. Our three main protagonists - Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and George-Jacques Danton - have long tapers that need to be lit. We need not only to see their flaws, but if we are to sympathise and embrace them, to see their human qualities too. Mantel understands that brilliantly. Indeed, there wasn’t much sympathy for Thomas Cromwell before Mantel decided to make him her raison d'écrire.

She also understands how history happens. Looking back in time, it is monumental and explosive; in its midst, and to its players, it is often tedious. Witness the summer drag of the post-Johnson Conservative leadership contest, and then the sudden avalanche of Truss and Kwarteng’s plummet. So, too, with Mantel’s lead up to the storming of the Bastille. One minute we are in the middle of inconsequential and diverting family dramas, the next Mantel has her king speaking out against the Estates and the beginning of his long inexorable walk to the guillotine.

‘Three days later, when they are back in their own premises, the King turns up at their meeting. In an unsteady and hesitant voice he annuls their actions. He will give them a programme of reform, he alone. In silence before him, black coats, bleached cravats, faces of stone: men sitting for their own monuments. He orders them to disperse, and, gathering his sorry majesty, exits in procession.’

This short paragraph captures all of Mantel’s genius. Details have been ached over so far - as they would in an almost thousand-page novel - but here in a wonderful sleight of hand, the microscope is swapped for the telescope. In an instant, and with that peerless phrase - ‘men sitting for their own monuments’ - we see from our privileged and terrifying vantage points the whole shooting match: the Bastille, the guillotine, the Terror, Napoleon and Europe in flames (again).

Arrest of Launay, Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1790)

Announcing, with the sad news of Mantel’s death a few months ago, that I was finally about to embark on her novel of the French Revolution, there was a sole Twitter naysayer. “It’s not very good … Mantel has a tendency to waffle … it badly needs editing.” I didn’t believe that for a second. Or rather, I thought, one man’s waffle is another man’s ‘colour and personality’. Without that, these characters are Wikipedia entries. Editing out the incidental robs us of anticipation. There is no dance without the still point, as T.S. Eliot would have it.

As I write, it’s still the summer of 1791. I know exactly where the narrative is heading. What I crave - and is this how you know a book is a masterpiece? - is for everything to move even slower. For time to crawl and show us glimpses of the different possibilities; something that achieves the motivations and inspired ideals that people initially harbour; for these characters to resist becoming monsters. Or maybe it’s that one of our finest writer’s oeuvres is now rendered finite. That her own glorious historical musings are now complete.