Hilary Mantel: recognition at last

In April 2006, Prospect's diary noted that Hilary Mantel was overdue for a literary award, being more highly rated by her peers (as measured by their reading recommendations) than any other novelist never to have won a major prize. And thus it remained until yesterday, when Wolf Hall was awarded this year's Man Booker Prize for fiction, to the loud delight of both critics and the reading public. Topping a top quality list, it was praised for being "a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century," and is an extremely welcome first win for publishers Fourth Estate. The Booker being what it is, at the time of writing Wolf Hall was sitting proudly atop Amazon's UK list of bestsellers not only in fiction, but in books as a whole, with Dan Brown at least momentarily lurking in second place. And even in the US it lay at number four, proving the point that there's nothing quite like the Booker—not even the Nobel—to make sales leap. As much as anything, this is because it's a prize that promises a "good read" in both senses: a pleasure and an intellectual reward. This year, it has delivered.

How is it that a historical novel managed to be so "thoroughly modern"? I've written before on this blog about the peculiar difficulties of speaking to modern times in literature, but there are plenty of other reasons to welcome Wolf Hall's particular brand of literary rear-window-gazing, not least among which is honesty.

Rewind to April 2007, and Hilary Mantel was penning a piece for this very magazine on the subject of revenge via fiction. "A clever writer," she wrote, "can do wonderful things with a snub. He can rub up a resentment till it shines so bright it puts the original insult in the shade. And almost always, he gets away with it." This is the art, she explained, of "sliding people into fiction," and it's one of the greatest sources of inspirations for the writer.

It's also, almost by definition, a kind of honesty that it gets easier to hone the more distance there is between an author and her subjects. Divided by half a millennium from the period she's describing, an author can skewer human foibles and ransack the present at will, safe from all possible scruples of offence. There's also, for a British author at least, the fact that the stage set by the past is in many ways both a grander and clearer one than the present offers. For Britain, hindsight can give great themes—rule, reform, ambition, ideology, passion—the space to unfold with a far greater urgency than present or recent history, where all too often the use of telling "details" can become an obstructive rigmarole of brands and trivial detailing.

As Mantel put it herself in an interview with the Guardian, she chose to set her novel in "the centre-ground of Englishness: this is so much part of our myth and our construction of ourselves… you have these great archetypes striding across the stage, and they're all types we know. Maybe we've even been them." Compared to such a past, the present can feel like mere aftermath.