Mantel Pieces

October 15, 2020
Adroit essays from the two-time Man Booker Prize-winning novelist. From the late 1980s, Mantel has contributed reviews, essays, and memoirs to the London Review of Books on topics that range from Madonna to Robespierre, from playwright John Osborne's "ferociously sulky" memoir to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and including a hefty dose of the Tudors. Interspersed with the essays are ephemera: brief letters to the journal's doting editors, especially Mary-Kay Wilmers, to whom Mantel once confessed having "critic's block"; postcards, emails (her own email address is redacted); and covers of the LRB that announce her contributions. The collection, then, serves as much as a display of Mantel's shrewd eye and stylish prose as a testimony to her long, fruitful association with the LRB. Her reviews are capacious, erudite, well informed, and exacting. "To accept an untruth, to assent to a lazy version of history, is not just negligent but immoral," she writes in praise of Charles Nicoll's book on the death of Christopher Marlowe. Likewise, she sees in historian John Demos' work about a woman taken captive by Mohawks "an exercise in scrupulous scholarship and imaginative sympathy." Admitting a "penchant for regicides," malice, and a bit of gore, Mantel has been drawn to books on the doomed and the damned: Marie Antoinette, Jane Boleyn, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Helen Duncan, a woman condemned for witchcraft in Britain in 1944. Besides being a revelatory examination of class, desire, and the phenomenon of spiritualism, Malcolm Gaskill's book on Duncan, Mantel writes, "is also in a wider sense an inquiry into 'how we know the things we know' and how what we can know or choose to know is circumscribed by our culture." That inquiry, of course, underlays her own forays into the past, including her memories: first meeting her stepfather, living in Saudi Arabia for several years, and suffering hallucinations after protracted recovery from surgery. A captivating collection.

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