Interview with Hilary Mantel

A surprisingly good, detailed and in depth interview with Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  Though it is A Place of Greater Safety which I remember most fondly - it is one of my all time favourite novels, though I did not know was her first effort (though not first published) until reading this interview.

Originally published in The New Statesman.

“Also, it taught me what I’ve long suspected: that public opinion is not something that features very highly in my life. Nobody should go into a trade like writing expecting applause, or universal approval, or even popularity. What appals me is that people mistake this constant storm of trivial abuse for some kind of freedom. ‘Me, speaking my mind!’ ” Her tone is boldly dismissive. “It’s not. It’s actually a huge distraction of the bread and circuses variety. To a large extent proper civic engagement, community engagement, proper political debate and activism, has been replaced by this. By illogic. By platitudes. And actually a lot of it is just abuse and bullying. There’s a nasty, narrow little conformism. And people are afraid, quite understandably, to differ from the norm. I think it’s a very sad state of affairs.”

The Crimson Petal and the ... who really cares

In a rare move, I have given up on Michael Faber's massive The Crimson Petal And The White.  After about 750 pages, I suddenly realised I utterly did not care what happened to any of the characters and did not have the slightest interest in what might transpire in the final hundred pages.

Sorry, Michael.  You obviously put a lot of effort into this book and thought you were onto something.  But size isn't everything.  The Fire Gospel was shorter, and much more interesting and entertaining than the bloated tome I have just put down.

Too much sugar is bad for you, you know.

RIP GGM

Aged 87, so hardly shocking, and I remember a foretelling of his imminent death about a decade ago, allegedly from the pen of the man himself. Though it was either fake, or he got better, as he carried on living and writing for years afterwards.

 As for the books themselves, I was flabbergasted the first time I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, but on re-reading it seemed flat, contrived and really just an endless recitation of random stuff happening.

Great ending though. I read lots of his books, and they all seemed pretty much the same, South American melancholia-by-numbers and lots of random stuff happening that was presumably meant to be portentous.

 I think the thing that annoyed me about 100 Years was the slab like pages of text, without dialogue or even paragraphs. Just endless recitation of what was going on, none of which really amounted to much. There were only a handful of key incidents in the book and the rest of it was just filling pages to give it an epic feel so it really did seem like a century had passed.

That said, the last time I re-read it, the fate of the luckless Mauricio Babilonia (yeah, I had to look up his name), a minor character I'd pretty much over looked before, struck me as incredibly sad. Fantastic apocalyptic ending. I've never been able to look at ants quite the same way since.

And still one of the iconic writers, for all my carping.

 And it is a shame he didn't get to live to a hundred, for obvious reasons.

Random Book Buying

Courtesy of Arty Bees in Wellington:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bill Shakespeare.  In the old Oxford Shakespeare / World Classics edition.  The one I quixotically started collecting just after they started doing them in different, less appealing colours.
• Tears of The Salamander and A.K., by Peter Dickinson.  Dickinson is one of the great British children's writers.  And he's still alive and still, intermittently, publishing.

And from Trade Me:

• Elidor, by Alan Garner.  Another great British children's writer.  I read his books devotedly as a child, and am now buying them for my own.
• The Devil's Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen.  How coffee invented the Renaissance.
• Collapse, by Jared Diamond.  Because the End Of Times is always interesting.
• Monte Cassino, by Matthew Parker.  In my teens I read Sven Hassel's gory account of the battle of Monte Cassino and have been slightly fascinated by it ever since.
• How To Read Marx, by Peter Osborne.  Not one of the silly 'X for Beginners' type books, but a genuine attempt to place Marx's economic and philosophical ideas into context and critique them from a modern standpoint.  Or something like that.

 Any bets on when any of these tomes may be read?