The Searing Clarity of Hilary Mantel

wrote with a . Her fiction overflows with the busy detritus of life: this plate of fruit, that whispered threat, children at play, a plucked string. The accretion of detail in her is so overwhelming that the dazzled reader can barely catch a breath, find a pencil, and look for trends. Yet behind the propulsive narrative and luminous prose are themes that would do any scholar proud. Mantel’s critique of the Catholic church, distilled in the sanctimonious person of Sir , burns like blue flame. She also closely observed the constraints that societies place on women. In Tudor England, interested the author as much as . When Mantel brings the two together, we see a woman in a man’s world colliding with power’s natural avatar; it’s like watching and dance a tango. Yet Anne got her