Join us to discuss Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, our September Book of the Month, Wednesday 26 September, 9-10pm

[TillyBookClub]

Our September book club choice, BRING UP THE BODIES, is shaping up to be The Book of 2012. It is Hilary Mantel's electrifying, pageturning second volume in her planned trilogy of Tudor novels, voiced by the master manipulator Thomas Cromwell. A sequel to the Booker Prize winning WOLF HALL, the story starts with Cromwell at the height of his power and influence, and Anne Boleyn beginning to lose hers. It is a fabulously famous story, yet Mantel manages to make it entirely new and fresh. Reading such expertly written historical fiction is a double delight: there are fascinating factual tidbits of Tudor life alongside brilliantly imagined inner workings of the mind. As Anne's world falls apart and the court struggles with the manic unpredictability of Henry, Mantel sustains heart-thumping suspense, even though the outcome is familiar to us all. But most gripping is the slow steady burn of Cromwell's character: an entirely bewitching, strangely seductive, Machiavellian, anti-heroic, self-made man. Mantel's abstracted narrative style, half observing from afar, half inside Cromwell's head, is a miracle: highly original, beautifully descriptive and entirely real. This is an exceptional, wonderful, revolutionary, exhilarating book that you deeply miss once finished. What a relief to know that another one will be on its way.

The book of the month page with more detail about Bring Up The Bodies is now live. You can also get a Kindle edition or a hardback copy of the novel here

We are thrilled that Hilary will be answering questions about BRING UP THE BODIES, her previous novels and her writing career in an emailed Q&A. So please put all your questions up here by 15 September, and we will send them on to Hilary. We'll publish Hilary's answers and discuss the book amongst ourselves on Wednesday 28 September, 9-10pm.

Hope you can join us...

@Clawdy

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this wonderful novel from Mumsnet and had not been able to put it down until it was finished. So many scenes still live in my head,even smaller scenes like Henry falling asleep at the table in Wolf Hall and Jane Seymour briskly tapping his hand...Above all Thomas Cromwell's image is in my head,and somehow he doesn't look like the Holbein portrait! What image was in your head as you wrote the book,what sort of face did you see?

In a way, I didn?t see the Holbein portrait either, though in a sense it must be ?true.? If you remember from Wolf Hall, Chapuys is dubious about it, and it?s he who tells us more than anyone about the impression Cromwell made, which was of an active, mobile person; it?s when he talks that he comes alive. He?s all resistance, in that picture. Just giving nothing. I think that, as KatieScarlett says, he?s under tight control. Hard to imagine him laughing. Yet we know he did.

@MumOfTheMoos

Will you, like Henry, miss him when he's gone? What do like best about him and eat do you like least?

A big question. I like his sheer energy, his appetite for whatever life throws at him: his fearlessness. I think what?s negative will emerge more strongly in the third book, and emerge out of complex circumstances too difficult to foreshadow here. He was a protestant at heart, but had to watch Henry burn protestants as heretics. Could he have done more? Was a wish for self-preservation over-riding everything else, by 1539? I don?t yet know what I?ll conclude.

In a sense your characters never go away. But you are sorry to have said the last word. You feel a terrible responsibility: this was my chance to get it right, have I taken it?

@typicalvirgo

Hilary I have just discovered that you grew up in the same village as me - although our paths never crossed as I went to H school.

I am an avid reader of historical fiction - I just love it but I am wondering how and why you came to be so interested in it too. H & G are not exactly famed for their Tudor connections !

No, not much of the Tudor world in Hadfield and Glossop, though the Howard family were big players locally. Incidentally, TC?s mother, name unknown, is sometimes said to be a Derbyshire girl, though I?ve not been able to convince myself of that. (No registration of births, marriages and deaths till 1538, when TC invented it.)

I?ve always had an intense reverence for the past, though I don?t know where I got it. Can you be born with such a thing? I?d always imagined, that being northern and of Irish background and a Catholic by unbringing, I was out of the mainstream, with marginal attitudes and interests; but now I?ve moved on to the central ground of English history and am stamping about on it in my clogs.

@Triathlonwannabe

I was really struck by the contrast between the healthy, cooperative atmosphere of Austin Friars, with merchants coming in and out, the loyal team of Rafe etc. supporting Cromwell, where everyone knows their place and value, and the poisonous atmosphere of Henry's court. Did you want the reader to pick up on this and see Cromwell as an alternative, better leader, as the start of the modern state, based on merit, not birth?

He says somewhere (in my novel, I mean) that he wants England to be like Austin Friars, where everybody knows what they have to do and feels safe doing it, and not like his childhood home, with banging and shouting all the time and people hurting each other. I think what he valued most was peace and order, and that meant strong government. That was the choice in the sixteenth century. You didn?t have a choice between autocracy and democracy. You had a choice between strong government, which meant the rule of law, or weak government, which meant a free-for-all. Of course, in pursuit of strong government, it?s possible to become highly repressive. Who can draw the line? Many of the measures he projected, but did not manage to put into place, suggest a radical thinker who wanted a fairer society. I don?t suggest he was a premature socialist or an egalitarian, but he did know that education changes the face of a society. And he knew that an economic system has casualties, and posited that it might be up to the state to create jobs.

I think he was a living reproach to the principle of inherited power. No wonder he was unpopular with the nobility. No matter how carefully he treated them, they must have wondered how many more Cromwells were lurking out there.

@OatyBeatie

... and on the topic of Cromwell as a political leader, when you have Cromwell pondering the possibilities of aiding the poor by strengthening the state's role in the economy, on the back of expenditure made possible by extracting money from the monasteries, do you envisage those as thought-processes that might actually have been likely among Tudor political actors? Or was that a (very pleasing) literary strategy for referencing our current politics? I wondered if you were possibly having a bit of fun by representing some of Cromwell's thought process about the economy in deliberately quite anachronistic terms?

He is shown as wanting to cause the monasteries to let go of their piles of cash so that money could flow into the economy and fund Keynesian-style infrastructure-building projects. It occurred to me that you were deliberately planting comparisons in our mind with modern-day banker fat cats who have to be "persuaded," to release money into the real economy of industry (rather than hording it for the purposes of financial/metaphysical speculation!), so that dissolution of the monasteries becomes something like a Tudor equivalent of quantitative easing. I enjoyed that!

When I am writing about the 16th century, I actually am writing about it. Modern parallels are pleasing but incidental. I haven?t invented the Cromwellian social programme. It?s startling, it?s revolutionary even, but it?s not anachronistic; in fact, along with what?s new, there?s some continuity with medieval paternalism.

The sad fact was, though, that by the time the money from the larger abbeys came in, England was under threat and the cash went on defence. The church bells were recast into cannon.

@Devora

Here's my question: have you considered doing Oliver Cromwell next?

Devora, that would be just too confusing for my American readers. It took me a while to introduce them to the notion that there were two Cromwells. (And to be fair, some of my British readers didn?t know either.)

@Peevish

Hi Hilary, I've loved your work since Fludd, and was particularly grateful for the timing of Bring Up the Bodies, which saved me from a bout of post-natal horrors which caused me to temporarily forget how to read.

I have a couple of questions, if that's OK.

You've said in interviews that you don't understand why some writers write the same books over and over again - did Bring Up the Bodies feel like a completely different novel to Wolf Hall as a writing experience, despite all their obvious similarities? And likewise the final instalment?

How do you make the leap from historical research, reading biographies etc of your 'real' Tudor characters, to making them live as much as the characters you've invented from scratch? Is there an imaginative process you follow from, say, the recorded facts about a 'real' character to making those facts come to life in the imagined life of your novel?

(I never have any sense at all in WH or BUtB of the research weighing heavily on the fictional world, or thought 'What an odd incident - she must have put that in because it's true.' )

Cheekily - final question. Is part of the appeal of writing about Cromwell his sheer ultra-competence and success at everything from cookery to languages to statecraft? Assuming (hoping!) you are at work on the final novel, are you finding it difficult or enjoyable, to depict his eventual 'failure'?

A lot of questions in there, dear Peevish, and I?ve had a go already at the one about the leap from research to bringing the character to life; I think there?s a crucial moment, hard to define, sometimes hard to remember, when you grasp your main character?s way of looking at the world. I get a sense of Cromwell as someone who?s very grounded in his body and in the sensory world. He?s clever, but he?s not an intellectual; his response to the world is from the gut. So I had to learn how to imitate that, because I just live in my head.

The two books feel very different, and I?m sure the third will be different again. Bring Up The Bodies is intense and compacted. I never relaxed during the writing of it; not like the way I did when we were chatting to Wolsey. And of course you?re right, Cromwell is exhilarating company because of his sheer ingenuity; he always seems to have a surprise in store (though sometimes an unpleasant one.)

They say all political careers end in failure. But that doesn?t mean they all end in futility. The wonder is that he got so far as he did.

@Sevillemarmalade

I have to begin with excessive gushing compliments - Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are astonishingly good novels. Amazing freshness and originality. Hope you will win Booker Prize in Oct.

I have a question (ok, questions!) about the mechanics of crafting your novels. I found in Bring Up the Bodies that the scene where Cromwell interviews Mark Smeaton changed the mood of the book and suddenly Cromwell did appear a much darker and more ruthless figure, easily capable of systematically destroying the men who brought down Wolsey. How do you create the tension and deliver it at just the right moment? Did you create lots of character scenes and juggle them around the historical framework or was it a more organic process where everything grew together? You note that some historians read and commented on WH while it was in development - what was the most useful contribution you received?

And a personal question if I may - when you have finished a book do you mark/celebrate the occasion?

Let me take the middle question first: historians. I didn?t actually know any when I started Wolf Hall. I just had a contact in California, Mary Robertson, who?d written her doctoral thesis on Thomas Cromwell?s ministerial household many years ago, and who had walked away, I was told, with a very good impression of the man she was writing about. We got into email correspondence and now we?ve met a couple of times. Knowing her stopped me from feeling isolated. It wasn?t any one single piece of knowledge that made me dedicate the books to her. It was the fact that she was open and sympathetic to my project, though it was fiction. She knew I was serious about my research and she was prepared to bounce ideas around. Since Wolf Hall came out, I have had interested letters from several historians, and I have built up a little network of contacts. But when I?m writing, somehow, I don?t ask for help. I think I need to work things out myself. It can be frustrating because I am not working with the resources of a great library. But then, I don?t go to the obvious sources of knowledge. My knowledge base is shallower than that of a professional historian of the period, but my inquiries are wider.

There are certain scenes (the interrogation of Mark Smeaton is a good example) where my inner playwright gets unleashed. I have to keep this animal under control because it would create plays that were a year long, but often I am making a scene in my head, hearing the various voices, shifting bodies in space. Instinct tells me that if you make the shape in space, you will make it on the page, and that if you are prepared to live the scene in real time, and internalize your characters? emotions, you will be able to express them ?out loud? for the reader.

When I?ve finished?.it?s hard to say when that is, as I rewrite most scenes many times, and am always revising. But there does come a moment when the closing paragraph is written and then I?m a husk, I?m an empty shell. I?m pathetic. I?m useless for any practical purpose. I can barely talk, much less celebrate. I just sit staring into space, green as a peapod, actually nauseous and shaky. Then I start the checking, which can take weeks, and which I do in a climate of fear, in case I find I have misunderstood some vital point. Before I?ve recovered, the manuscript has gone to my agent and publisher for an opinion, and I sit staring into space again, this time gnawing my knuckles. This stage never gets easier.

To finish up: thank you. The warmth of your response is wonderful, and I do thank you for being such attentive, engaged readers and for being in touch with me to tell me what you think. I will do my best to bring the story home, in the third book, in a way that will enhance and illuminate everything that has gone before. Meanwhile, thank you for your patience with what is essentially a work in progress, a character still evolving, and a writer still feeling her way.

Thanks very much indeed for all of those thought-provoking answers. I've really enjoyed reading them.

Thank you! I am in total awe of the way you have built such an engaging story based on the info available. I can't wait for the next book.

Yes, thank you for all of the time you have put into the answers. Can't wait for Part Three now!

I have had to skim over some of the answers because I've only just started reading Wolf Hall, and don't want to spoil it for myself, but I just wanted to say thank you to Hilary Mantel for an extraordinary set of answers. Bloody brilliant.

Wonderful thank you so much!

Am so excited about the third book, any idea of when it may be published?

They were extraordinary, weren't they Linerunner. So interesting to have been given such an insight into the process of writing fiction.

I'm wondering if everyone has gone quiet reading the hugely in-depth answers... if anyone wants to chat then I will be here till 11 but otherwise feel free to just add your thoughts as and when you want.

I am deeply in awe of Hilary's brain, and talent, and overall generosity in giving so much time and thought to her answers. Shall definitely be waving my Vote Hilary banner on Booker Prize night (16 October)

Meanwhile, we have another Booker shortlisted author for October's chat... will post thread link here in a few minutes...

Hi, Tilly.

The site went very slow again unfortunately between 9pm and about 9.50pm, so I expect a lot of people are catching up reading!

I would like to know what the individual posters thought of the answers to their questions especially the ones that reaveal so much of Hilary Mantel herself.

Glad everyone enjoyed it. And apologies if there were any questions that we didn't get to.

BUTB is a hard act to follow but...

...October's Book of the Month is the equally startling and original, Booker Prize shortlisted THE SISTERS BROTHERS, by Patrick de Witt. You'll be able to enter your name for your free copy from 10.30ish tomorrow when the page goes live - meanwhile, here's the thread

I have only skim read so far, but particularly the bit that said HullyGully thank you, you are right! stood out as startlingly perceptive and intelligent.

Will read the rest

WILL YOU STOP DOING BOOKS I'VE ALREADY READ AND GOT?

Jeez.

LOVE Sisters Brothers tho.

Oh good - I was about to start reading that!

Puppypanic and Matsikula: I'll try and find out when 4th Estate think they might publish the third and final book and I'll post here with any info.

I'm equally curious, Linerunner. I'd really love to know what each questioner thought of Hilary's replies. So please, peeps, tell us all...

But I may have to read it all tomorrow as my eyes beginning to swim.

Thank you, everyone, for the star quality of questions that helped make this such a vibrant, enjoyable Q&A. I've found it all fascinating, both the Qs and the As. Like I say, you can post on the thread anytime and keep the discussion going.

What about Rose Tremain and Merivel?

I have read all of Rose and love her dearly and haven't got Merivel yet

Or Jane Gardam? She has a new bok of short stories out which I haven't got either

Sorry I missed the "chat," it's film night, I saw a terrible harrowing film of misery and awfulness. It made Tudor England seem quite the picnic.

Or JK???

Dying to read hers.