If I were to create a dashboard or a visualization of my reading history for 2020 (in theory, I mean--I will spare you in reality), then it would be all about Hilary Mantel. I read six of her books last year: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light (the Wolf Hall/Henry VIII/Thomas Cromwell trilogy); AND Giving Up the Ghost, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, and Mantel Pieces. I wrote about the Wolf Hall books several times. I feel like I know Thomas Cromwell. I don’t want to hang out with him or anything, but I know him.
After I tore through the Wolf Hall trilogy, I read Giving Up the Ghost. Then I wanted to read another novel, so I read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which was loosely based on Hilary Mantel’s own experience as an expatriate living in Jeddah. She wrote somewhere else, perhaps in an essay, that the day she left Saudi Arabia was one of the happiest of her life. And if her life there was anything like the eight months depicted in this book, then I don’t blame her.
Eight Months reminds me very much of a Muriel Spark novel. This is very high praise, coming from me. Hilary Mantel reminds me of Muriel Spark in general; but specifically, Eight Months reminds me of the novels The Hothouse by the East River and The Takeover, and the story “The Go-Away Bird.” Eight Months is a first-person narrative told by Frances, the young wife of an engineer hired to work on a major building project in Jeddah in the early 1980s. Frances is a modern Englishwoman who struggles to adjust to her position as a woman in Saudi Arabia. She is also a person who is constitutionally unable to keep her feelings to herself, and unable to see things except as they are. She lacks the ability to deceive herself or to talk herself into accepting the unacceptable. Events occur and situations develop that a less observant person would fail to notice and a more astute and cynical person might notice but decline to acknowledge. But Frances is not capable of failing to notice; and having noticed, failing to act. People like Frances tend to struggle in places and times when the truth is not particularly valued. And I don't know that Hilary Mantel intended the book to be allegorical, but I think it is. I'll leave you to decide what it's an allegory for.
*****
My last Mantel for 2020 was Mantel Pieces, a collection of essays and reviews. And reviews of reviews, if that’s a thing; and it is, if Hilary Mantel says it is. This collection includes what was apparently a famous essay about the bodies of royal women; both in general and in particular; and especially Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. The press coverage about this essay focused more on Kate Middleton herself and far less on what Hilary Mantel actually wrote about her, which was a little bit about Kate Middleton herself and a lot more about how famous women’s bodies are assessed and critiqued and generally treated as public property. Hilary Mantel doesn’t suffer fools or foolishness; but she also has no patience for criticism that is cruel for cruelty’s sake. I don’t know how better to describe this than that she takes a jaundiced eye toward jaundiced eyes. Having now read Hilary Mantel’s fiction, autobiography, and essays, I am naming her as my author of the year for 2020. This is an honor that conveys absolutely no prestige or financial reward, but I do congratulate Ms. Mantel anyway. A win is a win.
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