A Place of Greater Safety

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I was on evening duty, and somebody jumped on me. It wasn’t a sexual thing. There were a group of pupils, with one person hitting me. Compared to what could have happened, it was trivial. It was dark, they were not my ­pupils, I couldn’t identify them, the school wasn’t interested in finding out. It was a shambles. I felt unsupported by the headmaster, and so I left, but I didn’t want to go, because I liked my pupils.

Because they live near each other, Desmoulins and Danton grow close, despite the differences in their personalities. Desmoulins is beautiful, funny, and creative, with a streak of cruelty – the novel implies that in a different historical moment he would have found himself at home in Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic circle. Danton, meanwhile, is deeply charismatic despite his extreme ugliness (his face was famously scarred by a childhood accident and smallpox). He is paranoid enough never to put any of his ideas in writing, but is also a brilliant public speaker who can inspire crowds with his hours-long electrifying speeches. I have to be frank. Writing a contemporary novel was just a way to get a publisher. My heart lay with historical fiction, and I think it still does. I was set very early. There was Shakespeare, there was Robert Louis Stevenson, and then there was reading Jane Eyre—specifically Jane Eyre, none of the other Brontë books. I was nine or ten. That was my first experience of realizing that there was another head in the world that felt like mine—the passage right at the beginning, when Jane’s relatives accuse her of being unchildlike. For a young reader that’s an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature. I totally identified with Jane as an unchildlike child. I never was very much interested in her love story.For France, and then for the rest of Europe, the world changed utterly in the years that followed 1789: new regimes, new laws, a new organization of the way property was held, a new system of education -- all these transformed the way people lived their So I formed a cunning plan. I thought, I’ll write another novel. I’ll write a contemporary novel. That was Every Day Is Mother’s Day. I started it in Africa. I finished it in Saudi Arabia. At times I had very little sense of where I was going with it or whether there would be any profit or success at the end of it. It was written in the teeth of everything. It was an act of defiance—I thought, I’m not going to be beaten. I got an agent, I got a publisher, then I wrote the sequel. It wasn’t planned as two books. It was, for me, a way of getting a foot in the door. But once I had secured a contract, I just rolled up my sleeves and I set about Vacant Possession in a way that I’ve never worked before. I would write through the morning, Gerald would come home midafternoon, would have his siesta, and when he woke up, I would read him what I had written in the morning. I’ve never written like that since. As I said, the book starts with each of the three main characters’ childhoods and continues through their early careers as lawyers in the early 1780s, and then through the Revolution. Mantel also writes about their personal lives and relationships, some of which might be her invention. Desmoulins is a brilliant man, but not usually a great public speaker, because he has a stutter, which, according to Mantel, began when he was sent to boarding school at seven. It might have been the trauma of the separation from his family that caused it, even though he is never particularly close to his family, and his father often seems disappointed in him. His stutter disappears when he is angry or excited, famously so in July 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, when he gives a rousing speech in the Palais-Royal, calling people to arms. Desmoulins’ speech is one of the events that leads directly to the storming of the Bastille.

Robespierre was ill. The raw spring weather hurt his chest, and his stomach rejected what he fed it. I would never do that. I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama. I know that history is not shapely, and I know the truth is often inconvenient and incoherent. It contains all sorts of superfluities. You could cut a much better shape if you were God, but as it is, I think the whole fascination and the skill is in working with those incoherencies. Mantel’s early novels— Wolf Hall was her tenth novel, her twelfth book—reflect the grimness she describes from her childhood and share a bleak, dark humor. The two completed books of the projected Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, are not without darkness, but considering their subject­—the bloody rise and fall of Henry VIII’s chief minister—they are remarkably vivid on the pleasures of work, home, and ­ordinary happiness. Both were awarded the Man Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to win the prize twice. This winter, a stage adaptation, Wolf Hall, Parts One & Two, enjoyed a sell-out run in London; a Wolf Hall­miniseries aired at the same time on the BBC. In February, Mantel was made a dame. In 1992, several years before winning the Man Booker prize twice in a row, critically acclaimed English author Hilary Mantel published A Place of Greater Safety, a historical novel set during the events of the French Revolution of 1789. Although it features hundreds of historical figures from the time, the novel focuses on three of the men that played key roles during the upheaval, tracing the lives of Georges-Jacques Danton, a vicious pragmatist with an iron will, Camille Desmoulins, a hyper-verbal and impassioned crusader, and Maximilien Robespierre, the unemotional true believer who created the Reign of Terror. I can talk to him or not. He never says, Tell me what you’re writing. He gives me space. And he’s completely accepting that, at a certain point, my writing might be going out to another person, and my emotional energy with it. He doesn’t say, Where’s my share? He’ll listen to me if I need to be listened to, and I hope that nowadays I don’t try his patience too much. I think I used to, particularly when we were in Botswana, where I was so intensely engaged with my material and there was nobody I could talk to about writing. It was me, my secret revolution, and Gerald. Oh, I think it must have been very boring at times. The writer is going round and round, and they insist they’ve got a problem, but you can’t see what it is. Now our relationship’s changed a lot because we’re business partners.

A place of greater safety

Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.” lives. Great families, very lately at the peak of their splendor, struggled to survive; newcomers rose dramatically, from workman to marshal of France or, in the most celebrated case, from impoverished lieutenant to emperor. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

cast of characters is wide and varied, from a conventional civil servant to Robespierre and his acid sister, Charlotte, from Choderlos de Laclos, the author of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," to the naive and enthusiastic Lucile, What does Jonathan Keeble bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book? Even so, buying A Place of Greater Safety was still a bit of a whim, as I didn't have much time in which to choose, but was still desperate to be exposed to Mantel's writing. Being very interested in history, particularly the French Revolution (in which the novel is set), the book turned out to be the perfect choice for me, as Mantle's ability to seamlessly interweave fact with fiction proved to be excellent.Some years ago, probably fifteen years ago, I was invited to the Huntington Library, to a conference along with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens—the lads, you know. I casually mentioned to a woman there that I was thinking of writing something down the line about Thomas Cromwell. And she said, When you do, we have a woman here you need to meet. I thought no more of it until the time came, then I said, You have a woman, I believe. And therein we fell into correspondence—very tentatively at first. Mary had long ago written a Ph.D. thesis on Thomas Cromwell’s ministerial household. She’d also written a couple of papers on his property holdings. But she had not really asked herself what this man was like, because that was not her job. But the account of that incident begins quite clearly on All Hallows’ Day. Rather, it begins the evening before, on All Hallows’ Eve. It seems I’m the only writer who has ever noticed that it’s the day of the dead. This is a man who, in the last three years, has lost his wife and two daughters. He’s now lost his patron and his career is about to be destroyed. Once you realize what day it is, everything changes. A man may cry for more than one thing at once, and when you ask him why, he may not tell you. This appears to me to be the kind of thing that a novelist notices and that historians manage to ­ignore, generation after generation. Their minds don’t make the jump because to them it’s just another dateline—it could be May the twenty-fifth. That strikes me as a really powerful example of how evidence is lying all around us and we just don’t see it.