How is Hilary Mantel so good?

[theotherfossilsister]

Like how did she do it? Is it like the three card trick she references in Wolf Hall? Have a huge tbr pile but once again I am rereading her. How is she so immersive? I genuinely can’t work it out even in this reread. Love A Place if greater safety since I read it at university in 2009 and feel like no one can touch her

If ever I think about how I might write a novel I think about how she writes and know it would be utterly hopeless even trying.

I just don't know how she did it.

I haven’t ever read her.

She wrote with a lyrical intensity but it still seemed so real and grounded. I loved how she 'became' Cromwell.

I find her books so overwhelming long and detailed they are intimidating. Requires concentration

I have reread this trilogy a third time in 2025

Am obsessed at her talent.

I read the Wolf Hall trilogy and thought it was hard going in places (my degree is in English albeit a long time ago but I love reading still). Really enjoyed the TV adaption as it was very immersive. I've tried some of her other works and haven't managed to finish any of them..... So I regret to say I'm not really a fan.

Yes I love her too. Beyond Black is too good, it left a very dark cloud with me for a long time.

Love Wolf Hall trilogy and A Place of Greater Safety was fantastic too - totally absorbing. I need to re-read them all too.

Absolutely loved A Change in Climate. And her two memoirs/collections. The second one features her old film reviews and an article about which perfumes she loves and what they smell like…. She can actually write about anything. She was a phenomenal writer.

I agree op. Sometimes certain sentences or phrases took my breath, they were just so brilliant. My own words here are too pathetic to even describe how amazing her writing is. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I was actually transported in time and space.

I'm a big fan, just so sad that she's gone. It took years for her to get A Place of Greater Safety published.
Wolf Hall is absolutely fantastic, even though I knew how it would end it was still devastating.

Sometimes I think her books are hard work but her prose is astonishing. The ending of The Mirror and the Light is a masterpiece.

Not all. For example, Every Day Is Mother's Day is a short book, as is the follow on. Plus her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.

It doesn't explain 'how' she does it (what would be able to?), but I found a combination of her Reith lecture series and her memoir 'Giving up the Ghost' to be something like a hall of mirrors on certain things that inspired or ate away at her (and also billowed and buffeted her in many parts of her life and research).

It’s frighteningly good. And one of the blackest things I’ve ever read.

I’m postponing a reread of the three Cromwell novels because it will the first one since her death, and me knowing there will be no more work from her.

Having said that, I admire but don’t much like her early novels like Every Day is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possession. They don’t have the humanity of her later work.

Agreed. I hate it and threw it at a wall the first time I read it, the only book that has had this effect. Masterly but horror on paper.

I have her books on Audible and listen on the tube. I listen to her memoirs a lot and her childhood games of Talking about the flats really makes me laugh. What a loss.

I think there is something wrong with me. I find her books turgid and laborious. I am yet to understand why they are so successful.

I agree she was the most incredible author. If you haven’t listened to Ben Miles reading the Wolf hall trilogy, please treat yourself

In answer to the question in the OP, she just isn’t.

Good stories, badly told imo.

Beyond Black is one of my favourite books ever. The ambiguity is so well done. Is Alison really psychic? Is she a deeply traumatised, unwell woman just trying to make a living in a world which has treated her awfully? It's just an amazing book (very bleak but still amazing).

And those brilliant cruel cameos from the petulant ghost of Princess Diana trailing around in her wedding dress, unable to remember William and Harry’s names and calling them ‘Kingy and Thingy’.

I remember her saying in an interview that her technique (I'm paraphrasing here) was to kind of surrender to the character of Cromwell. To forget herself and to imagine what Cromwell would be thinking and seeing. 'Imagine' is probably the wrong word here; I got the feeling it felt to her as if the ideas came from somewhere outside of herself.

I adore her writing. I like being forced to work when I'm reading - not all the time though. I'd follow a Mantel with something very easy to read.

Never read her but on the back of this thread I’ve downloaded Beyond Black. Sounds right up my street!

Oh, I hope you love it, despite the fact that it’s such an uncomfortable read. I once taught it (university module on the Gothic novel) and a student newly living alone with her young children in a fairly remote area once phoned me in a panic in my office hours because she’d frightened herself reading it after dark!