Shownotes Transcript
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast.
Last summer, when we released our list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and advisor to King Henry VIII.
Those books were also adapted into a British television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as King Henry. That television series aired here in the United States in 2015. It's now a decade later. And the third book in Mantell's series, The Mirror and the Light, has also been adapted for the small screen. You can watch that now on PBS.
I'm joined this week by Nicholas Pearson, currently publishing director at the British publishing house John Murray. He previously worked at the publisher Fourth Estate for more than two decades. It was there that he had the great opportunity to work with Hilary Mantel on, among other things, the Wolf Hall trilogy of books, the first two of which won the Booker Prize, one of the preeminent prizes in all of English language literature. Nicholas, thank you for joining the Book Review Podcast.
Pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Now, before I ask you, of course, a million questions about Hilary Mantel, I'd love if you could just tell me, tell us a little bit about yourself. You've worked in British publishing for a good while. You've worked with some amazing authors during that time.
Well, I've been working as an editor all my life since 1988. And I spent a very long time, much of that time at Fourth Estate where I teamed up with Hilary. I was 26 years there. And I've been lucky. I've worked with some amazing writers, some amazing American writers, actually, Jeffy Jennerty and Jonathan Franzen and others.
and others, and Doris Lessing, and I worked on nonfiction as well, not just fiction. And when did you first have the opportunity to meet Hilary Mantel, which maybe is different from when you first started working with Hilary Mantel? I first encountered her, having not read her, I'm completely honest, in the early 90s,
And I was at Faber and Faber and I took on a historical novel by a writer called Derek Bevan, a novel called Newton's Niece. It's been largely forgotten now, a wonderful book. And when I met Derek, I said, what's the story? How did this book come about? And he said, I did a writing course with Hilary Mantel in Reading Library just one Saturday morning.
And at the end of the morning, Hilary asked all of us to write a paragraph. And I wrote my paragraph and I gave it to her. And that was the beginning of the relationship he had with her. She liked what he had written, just these few sentences. And from that came that novel. So I encountered Hilary there and she was a great supporter of that book back in the day. And that's where I first befriended her.
So tell us a little bit about working with Hillary on Wolf Hall. I did a contract with her for two books. One of them was going to be one book about Cromwell.
And the other was going to be a small novella, a murder story set in Botswana in the 70s. Botswana, where she had lived for five years. And I did a contract for these two novels with her. And if I'm completely frank, there was quite a lot of pressure from my bosses that they wanted the Cromwell novel, the Tudor novel. They thought that was the tastier option of the two. And in fact, Hilary set about writing the other book
And then she got to a point where it was actually making her unhappy and she stalled and she stopped. And then it began. And I got an email one day from her saying, Nicholas, I think I've got it. I think I've, here's the first 40 pages of the Cromwell book. Will you have a look? Will you have a read? And I read them and-
I just said, this is great. You just have to carry on. And those 40 pages are very roughly the first 40 pages of Wolf Hall. What was your familiarity with Thomas Cromwell prior to all of this, prior to seeing those 40 pages? Oh, I knew...
I knew very little about him. I mean, that was wonderful. I was in a way encountering him for the first time. Here was this voice famously in the present tense. And I felt, having never met this man, there I was perched on his shoulders.
shoulder or crouched at the back of his skull through the lens of Hillary. So no, no, I knew very, very little. Every English child has taught the tutors, of course. I knew the rough outlines, but no, it was all new to me. After that first chunk of pages, did you see stuff along the way or did she deliver it fully baked? She would write big chunks and then share them with me and with her agent, Bill Hamilton.
And that was thrilling, seeing the book building itself block by block over a few years. And then there was a moment where she said,
Look, I've written 240,000 words and I've only just got Thomas More's head off. How many pages is that for readers who don't make, you know, the calculation of words to pages? Warfall is over 600 pages long, isn't it? I can't remember how long the manuscript is, but it's a lot. But she said, I think it has a shape to itself. But I'm only in a way partway into the story. Will you now read the whole thing?
And I happened to be going to Australia for work about a few days later. And I read a lot of Wolf Hall on an airplane with England disappearing in my rearview mirror, if you like. And I oddly finished that. I was going to the Adelaide Literary Festival and I slipped away at one point on a baking hot day and finished that novel sheltering at the back of a beach.
And it was a very peculiar experience. This is quite, in many ways, quite a sort of claustrophobic story set in the corridors. And there I was in the southern hemisphere with this sort of baking sun. And that's how I read it for the first time. And what, if you can recall, it's been a long time, two books have come out since. What did you say to yourself at the end of that book? I felt...
I mean, in many ways, things have been a bit frustrating for Hilary. A great writer. There wouldn't have been many fantastic novels until this point. But I felt something had shifted, something had changed, and it was...
It seemed to me something quite monumental. I have to put my hands up and say I'm not an expert in the historical novel. Of course, I've read many historical novels, but I'm not known as an editor of historical novels. So there's always a bit of that going on. But it felt to me something really very special. Now, as a publisher, one wonders what will then happen. I didn't finish and I think,
okay, her publishing fortune is going to change here. But I felt as a writer, a lot of things had come together in this book. And yeah, I thought it shifted things. I do think it was the way that, as you say, she puts you in Cromwell's head or behind at the back of Cromwell's skull that really drew a lot of people in with that first book. What were your thoughts? And did you have any notes for her on this after the first read?
The truth is there was very, well, there was no editing. She polished and she polished and she would draw things down and shift things around. She didn't need an editor in that sort of way. There weren't really notes from me. My role was just to encourage her and to be a little bit of a sounding board and just to keep going. Things with the last book, perhaps we'll come to that, but the last book
It was the same relationship, but that was a much more, in a way, unwieldy part of the story. And she knew that the book was at times getting a little bit too big and she had to make cuts. And she would say that even before I needed to say it to her. As an editor, as you say, who's been in the business for a while and has worked with many authors, I have to imagine that is more rare than not, having someone who delivers something that feels pretty tight
I worked with all sorts. In the last few years, I worked with a writer who delivered a novel that he knew needed to be cut by a third, and he wanted help cutting it by a third. And I helped him do that, and I pointed the way. But in terms of a collaboration with Hillary, as I say, it was really very little for me to do at all.
And at that early stage, did you or she or anyone have an understanding that it was going to end up being three books? You know, a trilogy in our culture holds great significance. Three books, three movies. It was obvious maybe to her that she was going to end with Thomas More and there would be more story to be told. But did she know at that point that it was going to end up being this sort of sprawling three book cycle?
No. And I think she thought that she would then finish the story in book two. But I was in this ludicrously fortunate situation of, we know what happened to Wolf Hall. It won the Booker Prize and it took over in the culture over here. It would have done anyway and it already had to a certain extent even before the Bookerhoved interview.
And then it all, it happened all over again with book two. So suddenly the contracts kept shifting and changing, but it was all gravy. It was terrific. If we could take a step back, what do you recall being the state contract?
or the reputation of historical novels at that time. As I understand it, after having read a lot of interviews with Hillary and a couple lectures that she gave, she was always interested in history, wanted to be a historian maybe when she was younger. When she decided to be a novelist, she tried a historical novel early on. But, you know, according to her,
Historical novels just didn't have the reputation, the juice that they have now. Maybe they were looked down a little bit upon. Is that true? I think that probably is true. I think the literary establishment were slightly sniffy about them. And, you know, to her enormous frustration at the beginning of her career, I think people know the story of the French Revolution, right?
novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which she couldn't even find a publisher for. And that was the very first thing she wrote, of course, and that wasn't published until 11 years. I think she had four novels behind it before that was finally published. No, she primarily thought of herself as historical novelist, and she wrote contemporary novels in a way to get herself going so she could become a historical novice. And having said that, I don't want to down to the contemporary novels of hers. I think that a very, very important part of
Of her career. And for those American listeners, at least, who may not remember, and certainly were not in England when the first book was published, can you describe the reception of the first Wolf Hall book? I do remember sending out book proofs.
to various writers. I can't quite now remember who exactly they were, but the reaction from other writers to this book in the months leading up to publication was extraordinary. And having told you what I was thinking on that beach in Australia, I was beginning to think, okay, I think things really might work out now in terms of how this book is received.
And then the reviews, apart from the Sunday Times, which gave it a big thumbs down, the reviews were absolutely ecstatic across the board. And it took off very quickly, almost immediately. As we both noted, it and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize, which is not necessarily common for an author to win essentially back-to-back bookers for two books in a series. What
Unfortunately, she's not here to talk to us about this, but how did she feel about that? How did she feel about all of a sudden not only having this book that was received well, was selling well, but was rocketed into the literary stratosphere because of the reception of this major prize?
She was thrilled to win the Booker Prize. She was absolutely delighted to win it again. No, that was a big thing for her. It wasn't as if her writing career had been a struggle up till Wolf Hall. She wasn't read in any significant numbers. And suddenly she was being properly read and properly read all over the world. And that meant an awful lot to her. And it freed her up financially, of course, and she could think about the rest of her career in a different sort of way.
You have described her Cromwell books as telling, quote, the great founding story of the modern state and that, quote, they are about the making of modern England. I'd love if you could expand on that. Well, it's about the 1520s, 1530s, 1540s. It was about the sloughing off of medieval England and the beginnings of a modern state.
And the Church of England, everything shifted, everything changed. And that's what, on one level, yes, it's about this particular man, but on one level, that's what she's exploring. A lot of people have, at the time, and particularly subsequently when Brexit happened and all that sort of stuff,
People like to try and draw comparisons to the period she was writing about and what's been the craziness that's been going on in British politics and British society in the last 10 years, especially. And she didn't necessarily like that. I think she said at one point, history isn't a rehearsal.
And that's what she was so brilliant at capturing. She was examining people who were in the moment. They didn't know what was going to happen to them next. And that's where I think the thrill as a reader comes with those books. You're with them. Of course, you do know that Cromwell ends up on the scaffold, but there's that sense reading those books that these people are, they're experimenters. You and she published the first book. And what was the conversation when Cromwell
She said, okay, it's time for me to sit down and work on book number two. She always had terrible health problems. And she ran into a major health problem just after all the Wolf Hall hoo-ha. And that knocked her for a year. And very little work got done. And then she recovered. And then she actually wrote Bring Up the Bodies quite quickly. And...
It doesn't feel as if it's necessarily written quickly, but that book has a very different rhythm to Walthall. Walthall is quite an expansive novel. There is a sense of all the underbelly of the whole of British history, which occasionally surfaces. There's the mythical aspects of English history there.
Bring Up the Bodies is most of the action takes place in those three weeks in May in the run up to Amberlynn losing her head. You're on a sort of conveyor belt in that book. It's a much more sort of concentrated and focused and laser-like book.
So it's quite a different beast. But no, she wrote that quite quickly. And then I got another email from her saying, oh my Lord, I've got Amber Lynn's head to come off now and I'm still not finished. But I think this has a shape all to itself. I think you should read this in its entirety now. And I'd read little bits of it actually through that whole process, as I've described. And off we went again and we had to read, and we were delighted to do another contract for book three.
Eventually, I know how each of the three is going to end. There's one guy loses his head here. Yeah, this lady, she loses her head here. And then, well, poor Thomas Cromwell, he's a head shorter at the end. I'd love if you could explain to me what English people think about the Tudors. I feel like...
Aside from the TV versions and stage productions of Wolf Hall, it was like Henry VIII and his many wives, at least here in the States, has always been a slight obsession. How are they regarded over there? It's a particularly juicy period in English history, and everyone continues to be obsessed with those decades.
But it never, it's always Henry VIII, Henry VIII, Henry VIII, of course. But no one, in a way, it's not as if Hillary comes at it obliquely, but she's coming at it from a different angle. She's coming at, you're on Cromwell's shoulder. You're not on Henry VIII's shoulder. No, I mean, there's, it's endless. And it will go on, I think. It's never going to disappear, that interest over here in that period. We'll be right back. ♪
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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Nicholas Pearson, the longtime editor of Hillary Mantel. How did you feel about Thomas Cromwell before you read this book, and how, as a reader, and how did you feel after? What did you start to think about this man as you were one of the first people to experience this story?
This doesn't reflect very well, particularly on me, but I thought about him in relatively black and white terms. I thought of him as a baddie. And life's much more complicated than that. And people are much more complicated than that. And suddenly one is in the hands of Hillary, who is dealing with ambiguity and things are much more mixed up. And my view of Cromwell changed. As I admitted to you, I didn't know an awful lot about him. I just knew the broadest outlines.
But it's very interesting, this trilogy, how your view of him shifts and change and deepens and darkens and lightens as you move through these hundreds and hundreds of pages. I find particularly touching the scenes, they're all in Wharf Hall, with the family before the family, with his wife and children. I find all that very touching.
I recall seeing A Man for All Seasons at some point. And of course, in that film production, that movie, Cromwell is a villain. He's, as you say, he's a baddie. And then to start to experience him, to start to live inside his skin, I recall thinking...
this guy is good. Not good as in he's a good person, but look at the talent behind this man who rose from these relatively minor circumstances to navigate the labyrinth of court life to rise to the station that he had. Hillary was an outsider. She was an intellectual in a working class Irish Catholic family.
She was an outsider in her own body to a certain extent with these sort of health problems that dominated much of her life. She wasn't part of any literary clan. Her style is all her own. And as an outsider, I think she was drawn to outsiders. And of course, Cromwell's one of the great outsiders. She'd written about outsiders before in The Giant O'Brien, Alison in Beyond Black, and there are various others. But there was a sympathy there between Hillary and him. Mm-hmm.
So the second book comes out and then, of course, everyone says, all right, can't wait for the next one. It's going to be out soon. And not unlike George R.R. Martin and his still unpublished Game of Thrones follow up. It took a little bit longer than she thought it would take to publish this. And people are not necessarily happy to walk me through those years.
Well, I did have my boss standing over my shoulder saying, when's the mirror and the lights going to be delivered? But by now, my role was to protect Hillary from all those sort of pressures. And of course, by the time Amber Lynn's head comes off,
The story is quite swollen. There's a lot of other things going on, and it was a very complicated book for her to bring home. It is a very meaty book. Wolf Hall is not a short book. Bring Up the Bodies is wonderful, slim volume in between the two. And then The Mirror and the Light is a big one. Did she... Was she thinking through the structure? Was it just the number of characters? Was it...
What was it that, I don't want to characterize it with my own words, but what was it that led her to take a little more time on this one? It was just the complications of bringing the story home. She always knew where, we always knew where we were going. And in many ways, we were going back to the very first sentence of War of Halt, so now get up. So the arc of the story was there. She used to do a do-it-yourself thing.
down on plot. She used to say she wasn't very good at plots. I don't think that's true. That's why one of the reasons she was drawn to historical fiction, because the plot was all laid out for you and you were dealing in between what happens to characters and how they think they understand those events. So it was all laid out. It was just a difficult one to bring home. Once your role shifts, as you say, to being the protector, the intermediary, keeping the
the noise away. What does that look like? What form does that take? Is that just telling people, be patient, just wait, it'll come when it comes? Exactly. She was by now living in Devon. I didn't used to see an awful lot of her. I'd go down there once or twice a year and obviously see her when she was in London. We would correspond a lot. I'd just leave her alone, let her get on with it. She was her own thing. And I've got to tell you, she's an
Utter delight to work with. Incredibly lovely woman. Funny.
generous to me and generous to others, very generous to writers. And she had all these other things going on. She was still writing for the New York Review of Books, wasn't she? When I think perhaps that was just coming to an end, I think when The Mirror and the Light started and she was writing for the LRP. She had a lot on her plate and there was a lot expected of her having one of these two bookers. So she had those sort of commitments and she was living in Budley Salts and involved in helping with the literary festival down there.
It was about managing her time and also the health problems. She would go through periods where she couldn't, in a way, that's why she was a writer in the first place. She couldn't do a nine to five job. She knew that. She had to do things in between these periods of bad health. So it was all about harvesting her time.
So after this period, people are champing at the bit for this book to come out. It arrives in March 2020. A lot else going on in March 2020. What was it like for the two of you to put this out into the world at this time of great global stress? The way we announced it to the world is we took a digital poster in Leicester Square, I think only for about 15 seconds. All we had to do was have a couple of people there with a camera and
And we put up an image of the Tudor rose and the sentence, so now get up, and nothing else. And this was captured, went viral, and bang, we were away, everyone knew. And then I think, I can't remember now, a week later, we announced the book and a date. And then, yes, we published it.
In, I think on the first week or the second week of March 2020, funny aside story, I'm not even particularly funny, but on the day of publication, there was a photograph of just my hands holding an open copy of The Mirror and the Light. And that photograph was used.
in an editorial in The Guardian on publication day of this novel about this being a great literary event and actually what a wonderful moment it was for the novel in general. And just my hand cradling this book. That same photograph was used by the same newspaper three weeks later to tell a very different story. There was a lot of upset in the bookshops at the time and people felt that
books were the spreader of the virus. Oh, no. And they used that same thing to graph them. Your filthy hands were spreading the disease. Filthy hands. But we managed to have, I think, two weeks of
of sales before the bookshops were shut down and people have been waiting for a decade by now and sales were enormous. And then it became a great lockdown. It became a lockdown read. But I think we were obviously, this is all in retrospect, but we were relieved that we had those two weeks before this whole country was shut down. After the shutdown, the lockdown, were you corresponding daily or weekly with Hillary about the book, about its reception, about...
everything going on in the world? Yeah, she was incredible. It was a wonderful emailer. She used to send these tremendous emails, not just to me, to an awful lot of people. But when Hillary died, people talked about the correspondence they had with her. That was always a highlight for me when a Hillary Mantel email popped into my inbox. I can't quite remember, Gilbert. We were mainly in touch by email. As I said, I didn't see huge amounts of her. But I think she was
It was interesting for her by now. She'd been, what was it, 15 years of her life? It was a big chunk of her life that it had taken up.
And it was in a way, it was coming to an end. But there was, of course, the plays. Yes, I wanted to ask you about those. Absolutely. At one point, she wrote or she said, I can't remember where I got this quote. And if there's one thing I regret about my career, it is that I didn't get involved with the theater earlier. She eventually did, working very closely with the stage productions of the Wolf Hall books. Tell me about how...
much she loved doing that and why and what it was like. As a young girl, she had been, I think she went to Stratford and saw four plays in the space of five days as a 16-year-old. And that was quite a formative experience in her life. And the experience of books one and two being turned into plays, she adored that.
I think it almost meant more to her seeing these novels turned into plays and being performed at Stratford-on-Avon and that
loop of her life coming full circle. I think that almost meant more than anything to her. And she had a particular relationship with Ben Miles, who played Cromwell on the stage. Ben's a wonderful actor. Ben and Hilary adored each other. And she was very involved in how those plays came onto the stage and would be in rehearsals. And there was this strange sort of feedback loop going on because seeing
her version of Cromwell through Ben Miles on the stage began to feed back into the mirror and the light. I think she began to think of Cromwell ever so slightly differently. So creatively, that whole process fed back
fed into The Mirror and the Light a little bit. And another thing that was going on was Ben Miles and his brother George, who's a very, very fine photographer, and Hilary had been traipsing around the remnants of Tudor England, photographing what remains of Tudor England, which is a book that
I put out at Fourth Estate, as it turned out, only about three weeks before she died, in fact, within a month before she died. But that process, some of those photographs, also slightly informed The Mirror and the Light. There's a photograph in that book of a dog. And when she saw that photograph, she went away and wrote a scene around that dog, which you can find in The Mirror and the Light. Creatively, it was helpful to her. It's...
Amazing to think of her being part of these theatrical productions, someone who's been sitting alone at a desk for years and years and years, you know, writing these books. And I'm not going to try to put myself in her mind in the way that she put herself in Cromwell's mind, but to imagine the joy at collaboration, at being around other people all the time, and the very specific way that theater is after being alone as a writer for years and years. I totally agree, because she really was...
On her own, she lived with Gerald in the flat down at Bodley Salterton. And she just wrote. She just stayed there. She wrote. She lived in her own head. And I think it was a great surprise to her how much she enjoyed the collaborative aspect of the theatrical experience of those books.
I do wonder if given the fact that Mark Rylance had a theatrical pedigree of his own, if it was equally wonderful to see another sort of essentially stage interpretation of Cromwell, different from Ben Miles, but someone who was as known for his work in theater as he was for film.
She's a very big admirer of Mark Rylance's portrayal of Cromwell. And of course, it's very different to the way Ben Miles plays it. It's much calmer. It's quieter. He's looking on in a very sort of different way. There's a difference in the menace. A film can capture...
the power of his stillness in a way that is, that would possibly be deadly on the stage. As he stands there, almost not moving, but you can see in close up, thoughts almost run across his face. It's incredible. Yeah, he's brilliant. Brilliant. So I'm curious, as we approach our close here, did she consider these to be, despite all the other books that she wrote, and I'm a particular fan of Beyond Black, her life's work in a way, or did she not think in those terms?
She'd been thinking about this project for decades before she sat down and wrote So Now Get Up. I don't think she thought this is going to take up 15 years or whatever it was. I mean, I don't ever remember her saying, this is my defining achievement or anything like that. I think she felt that a lot of the things she'd been writing about all her life were
came together in this story. The outsider, corruption and power politics and how societies and individuals form themselves and Irish Catholicism, the female body. A lot of it is scattered in her previous work.
And to a certain extent, I don't think it was until, this might be going too far, but until she sat down and wrote her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, and challenged her life in an unambiguous way. I think in a way, I think that cleared the decks and allowed her to do what she did with this trilogy. It is probably what she will be most remembered for.
What do you, as someone who has read these books closer than almost anyone possibly, what are some of the things that you enjoy the most? Do you have favorite moments, favorite scenes, favorite lines? I'm always curious when I speak to editors, what are the things that stick in their brain? There's a moment towards the end of The Mirror and the Light where...
Cromwell's walking to the scaffold and for a project that is relentlessly in the present all the way through, there's a moment where he looks out and sees people in their houses and people going about their daily business. And he thinks of a world beyond him, a world in the future, a world that in a way belongs to us readers looking back on English history. And I just thought that was absolutely brilliant and very moving and that put
I did put tears in my eyes. I suspect also because I was saying goodbye to this man that in a way I'd been working with for 15 years. But I can't remember, it's about three or four pages towards the end of the book, perhaps even close to the end of the book than that. That is a particular moment. It's too easy to say that first sentence, so now get up. But I think that was, again, this is going a little bit too far. It was like a sort of message to her editor.
And to herself, I think she was, it was like, come on, now's the time. Now's the moment. So those four words are very important, but there's bits scattered throughout, throughout all three of those books that I'd actually love in Warfall, those moments where it does step back and looks at the sort of histories buried under Tudor history. I love those moments.
And I made a bit of a fool of myself when I said to her when I first read Bring Up the Bodies that I missed those. And she explained to me how it was written in this different register. There wasn't room. There wasn't time to stop and put that in this story as Amber did in Hurdles Towards Her End. But there's so much in those books. I just think they're incredible.
They are incredible, and I think they will be read for quite a long time. Nicholas, it's been a real privilege and a pleasure to have you on to remember and reflect on your relationship with Hillary and the Wolf Hall Trilogy. Thank you so much for joining us. Gilbert, thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. That was my conversation with Nicholas Pearson, Hillary Mantel's longtime editor about the Wolf Hall Trilogy.
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening. Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it. So don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto Insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USA!