Hilary Mantel tells Matt Cox her strategies for completing a historical narrative when the facts are missing.

It struck me listening to Hilary Mantel at the London Book Fair this week, and talking to her, that the gap between the historical novel and biography is getting narrower. The factual component of novels like Wolf Hall (30 years in research and development), seems to be increasing in direct proportion to the fictionalizing of biography and the movement toward ‘creative nonfiction’. Hilary Mantel sympathised with my view that, although the historical novel and biography are still readily distinguishable genres, they do share common problems, one of them being, what to do when important facts are missing.

The perfect author

There is a mischievous quality to Mantel. In the same way that she is fascinated by Thomas Cromwell’s eyes - which would fix on you ‘to see if you were believing the lies he was telling you’ - she has a distinct twinkle in her eye too. She comes across as simultaneously homely (in the way of a favourite aunt), and ferociously bright (in a won’t suffer fools gladly way). Mantel seems to have the perfect mindset for an author. She is interested in originality, the unobvious and ‘what happens at the margins’ of life and history. She is fascinated by intensely domestic detail as much as she is the broader affairs of state. Her compass is wide.

Net and compass

The dilemma of ‘missing facts’ has long been a recognised issue in biography writing. Julian Barnes describes the problem by analogy to a fishing-net which the biographer casts out to trawl for information on his subject. The net is ‘a collection of holes tied together with string’. For the biographer, there will always be more holes than string no matter how many times he throws out his net. With a trend for the historical novel to be increasingly fact-based, what approach is the genre taking to plug the factual holes? How does a historical novelist like Hilary Mantel approach the issue?

In her Author of the Day presentation at the Book Fair, Mantel talked about this problem in researching the facts of Thomas Cromwell’s life. Although his later years are well recorded, there is a 30 year period of his 55 year life that is almost entirely undocumented. Mantel’s approach to filling this long period of seamless holes is what she calls ‘constructing a cultural hinterland’.

She admits that the way she thinks and writes is not suited to imagining an entire period of years in order to construct a continuous, chronological block of narrative. Rather, she involves herself in meticulous research. And it is here that her wide compass helps, as she interrogates the details of Tudor life from the angles of the public sphere, local life, domestic and family conventions and contemporary language.

It is when she describes researching the language of the Tudor period that Mantel’s eyes twinkle most brightly. She is interested in using language of the period which is still meaningful today without sounding stilted. The use of archaic vocabulary, expressions or grammar would have jarred with the immediacy of the present tense which she uses throughout Wolf Hall. In a novel which relies heavily on dialogue, Mantel’s ear for consistent language, and her avoidance of the archaic or anachronistic is essential to its success. Linguistic consistency between those parts where she relies on recorded facts and those where she relies on her own research is also key. The precision of her language is itself a strategy for conveying seamless authenticity.

Cultural hinterland

From her meticulous research Mantel constructs a whole fact-based world that would have been inhabited by Cromwell for the missing 30 years: the cultural hinterland. Mantel’s use of the word ‘hinterland’ is a perfect example of the sort of linguistic precision she employs. The word trips off her tongue in a spontaneous answer to a question but it is used scrupulously. The hinterland is the ‘back country’, the world behind. It is also the ‘fringe area’, the lesser known, marginal territory that she delights in exploring. But the word doesn’t just convey the physical facts of background history; it connotes the psychogeography of her subject. It conveys the mental hinterland of Thomas Cromwell, what DH Lawrence referred to in Last Poems as the ‘unexplored hinterland’ of the mind.

Having a similar ‘missing facts’ issue with my own work, where I am reliant on a single, sometimes unreliable source to describe a twenty year period of a historic life, I asked Hilary Mantel about the specific techniques she used to invoke that cultural hinterland. Once she has created her background world, how does she make it serve her narrative? Because it does not suit her to produce a continuous narrative of the missing period, Mantel mainly employs flashbacks in her protagonist’s mind. She simultaneously uses and creates Cromwell’s ‘own’ recollections of his past as a means of describing it. Her own research has ensured that such recollections will have authenticity as well as a narrative consistency. Mantel also consciously homes in on any small details that fascinate her. By choosing the correct detail, she believes that the reader will share her absorption and stay engaged with the character and the narrative: ‘choose very small resonant moments, things that strike a chord with you.’ This is completely in line with Mantel’s overriding recommendation – ‘write the book you would want to read.’ (Her other piece of overarching advice is ‘assume your reader is more intelligent than you’.)

Culinary creation

Mantel is a firm believer in flexibility, in the freedom to reorder material. The enormous challenge of designing and constructing Wolf Hall involved ‘industrial engineering’ in the movement of ‘massive blocks of fact’. The only way for her to achieve this heavy lifting is to use a large drawing board in her kitchen. There, she can endlessly rearrange her notes and material ‘taking five minutes to sort out Cranmer when the eggs are boiling’. It is therefore predictable that she cannot understand how writers favour ‘little spiral bound note books’ with their suggestion of continuous and error-free linear progression. The draughtsman is now back at her kitchen for the sequel to Wolf Hall, an account of the next five years of Thomas Cromwell’s life. The drawing board is doubtless overflowing, and the eggs perfectly timed.

Matt Cox 24 April 2010

• This piece is an account of comments made by Hilary Mantel at a public session at the London Book Fair and in my subsequent discussion with her, 19 April 2010.

• Image copyright London Book Fair