Revolutionary reading: " A Place of Greater Safety" by Hilary Mantel

This is a long-outstanding recommendation pending on my reading list, dating back at least a couple of years, initially on the part of that connoisseur of (a) historical novels and (b) the French Revolution, Julian Priestley, and recently renewed in conversation with another personal literary lighthouse, Paola Buonadonna. But experience warned me that a novel by Hilary Mantel is not a matter undertaken lightly, and The Place of Greater Safety had to wait for propitious summer circumstances before I felt ready to take it on. 

It's not only a matter of sheer length, though the 872 pages of my paperback-brick edition, covered with print that has me reaching for my brand-new reading spectacles in anything less than perfect light, are daunting enough. The real challenge, familiar to readers of the Wolf Hall (to be) trilogy, is Mantel's quirky prose style. Pronouns are slippery: who is the "I", the "she", the "we" in action? Perspectives shift without warning: suddenly the omniscient narrator becomes a first-person inner voice. Place and time jump unpredictably between, or even during, scenes. Standard paragraphs give way to stage-style dialogue, or note-form non-sentences. As ever with Mantel, it pays to be on your toes - this is not stuff to read in bed of an evening as you drop off to sleep. Frankly, it is all a bit of an effort; I will confess to numerous occasions when I would become aware halfway down a page that I didn't actually know which characters were participating in a scene and need to backtrack to find names and establish identities. 

What does all this achieve? Well, arguably, this is more how people think and experience the world - glimpses, snatches of conversation, fragments of thought. Cumulatively, it works extremely well in an evocative, allusive manner, building up an intimate portrait of Mantel's characters. It is also the way she has always written, it seems. I was aware that this novel was a relatively early work - it was first published fully 23 years ago, in 1992, and recently republished on the back of her recent successes - and had wondered if her style might be more straightforward than it was in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But no, not at all. This multi perspective, shifting technique is at the core of Mantel's method.


But what of the story itself? It is, of course, in the first place a historical novel, based on real characters and real events. As Mantel points out in an author's note, she has, on the whole, been very faithful to the historical record, even to the extent of lifting text verbatim from the letters and speeches of her protagonists. However, as she also points out, the historical record is extremely skimpy, especially as far as the early and private lives of her characters are concerned. The freedom these gaps give her, together with her main concern to get under the skin of her characters, to examine their inner thoughts, motivations and impulses, is what makes this a work of fiction rather than of history - for all that it might indeed also be a reasonable stab at decoding and understanding that history. 

Mantel's story centres on three young men who will play leading roles in France's revolution and ultimately be consumed by it: Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton and Camille Desmoulins. These are very different characters, but all start out as educated young provincials keen to make a mark. Danton, who for a while styles himself d'Anton, is the most classically ambitious, taking the lawyer's path to public eminence and displaying most clearly what most would recognise as leadership qualities. He is also a bruiser, pragmatic, even cynical in his methods. For all his sins, which are many and on occasion severe, it is probably Danton who makes the greatest claim on the affections of the reader. Camille Desmoulins, in total contrast, is emotionally and physically fragile. His power lies in a certain personal charm, linked with his vulnerability, and his ferociously effective use of language. He is a pamphleteer, a specialist in revolutionary tracts and vicious personal attacks. Though known to all, he is, with the exception of a moment of crazed bravura which makes his name, a backstage player. Not for him the incendiary and rousing speeches of a Danton in the National Convention, nor the string-pulling and manoeuvring of a Robespierre, but the passion and power of the written word. Finally, Robespierre, aloof, idealistic, detached, somehow inhuman in his incorruptible moralism and devotion to a Revolution he seems to see as his personal property. 'Twas not ever thus. The young Robespierre is more sympathetic, less sure of himself, genuinely altruistic with high principles, including an unfashionable opposition to the death penalty. The way Mantel depicts his seamless transformation into the character who, by the end of the tale, signs friends' death warrants with little compunction, is masterly.

These personalities do not exist in a vacuum. Indeed they are surrounded by a vast, sometimes confusing array, of secondary characters (several pages at the beginning of the book are devoted to listing the cast). These fall into two overlapping categories: the public realm and the private sphere. In the former, we have allies and adversaries, republicans and royalists, factions and fanatics. Behind them all, the ever present Parisian mob, ready to riot and rebel, to loot and lynch, often at the behest of politicians. The public events, some of which are dealt with extremely briskly (as with the blink-and-you-miss-it decapitation of Louis XVI, by then an almost irrelevant Louis Capet), are interwoven with the private lives and interactions of the protagonists.  Mantel spends as much time with Danton and Desmoulins at home, with their wives, children and mistresses as he does with them in their professional milieux. It is in this environment that she can explore their deeper motivations and personal positions, unencumbered by the grandstanding and political correctness of howling, revolutionary Paris, a hothouse often contrasted with the calm and relative good sense of the provinces. It is thus moreover that strong female characters, generally excluded from direct involvement in public life, can influence the course of events.

As in her Wolf Hall novels, it is the characters and how individuals confront and affect the course of events, that really interest the author, rather than the historical meaning or significance of the events themselves. This is not a commentary on the French Revolution itself. Was it a good thing? Was it all worth it in the end? Various views are alluded to (the book's final paragraph is a quotation from the Times of London), but the Revolution is treated here more as a context for the playing out of personal dramas, and as at leat in part their outcome, than as a phenomenon in its own right. In any case, we know what happened next (though I for one am still a bit shaky on exactly how), a fact which Mantel knowingly winks at with a passing reference to the distinguished service of a young lieutenant in the revolutionary armies, a certain Buonaparte. That said, Mantel, like many other authors, is clearly drawn to periods of momentous historical change which individuals must navigate as best they can, with the attendant risks and opportunities. I see now that the Tudor England of the English Reformation bears many resemblances to revolutionary Paris - the jeopardy of individuals, the plots and politics, the arbitrariness of how power is exercised, the unpredictably shifting orthodoxies, the ups and downs of personal fortunes, the ever-present background of violence, incipient and actual, and the extreme price of downfall. 

Hilary Mantel, with another book

Would I recommend this book? Yes, but beware. This is the genius Mantel at work, and she is hard work. Maybe her technique is not yet quite as refined as it become in her more recent work, a little showier, to maybe slightly less effect, but it is very much the demanding, but high reward, read we have come to expect, over 872 dense pages. But if you are up for it, you are in for a depth of characterisation of these well-known revolutionary heroes far beyond what you have come across before. With Mantel, you get to know the characters in a way which, in spite of - or perhaps because of - its fragmentary nature, goes very deep into how they really were - or at least how Mantel imagines them to have been. This is what she does, and it is done here, in this early novel, in that supreme way that we see again in her later depictions of Thomas Cromwell. So yes.