Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
by Hilary Mantel
(4th Estate, £16.99)

HILARY MANTEL, most famous for her epic Thomas Cromwell trilogy — Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light — first made a name for herself on the 1980s book-reviewing scene.

It was very different in those days, she writes, with more daily papers “and they made space for books.”

She wrote for the Listener, the Literary Review and, forgive her, the Spectator. But she found a home at the London Review of Books (LRB), for which she has written ever since.

Her letters, faxes and emails to the LRB’s editors punctuate this new collection, like joint dispatches from Agatha Christie and Oscar Wilde: “I have to kill off Cardinal Wolsey soon, and I’m going to miss him so much. The outfits, my dear!”

She is clearly very fond of the publication, whose long-form articles sated her desire for nuance and gave her the freedom to digress and to tease, to be deeply personal and highly political that she had always craved.

Mantel has many strings to her bow, firing off eloquent, funny and often mordant pieces about the likes of Marie-Antoinette (“fatal non-reader”) Madonna (“onstage antics with Romish paraphernalia have never brought her quite the odium she craves”) and the Devil, whom Mantel meets as a circus strongman –—“naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species” — in a hospital ward.

Recovering from an operation, she hallucinating in agony: “I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out … just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery.”

Perhaps the most engrossing and surprising piece is Boxes of Tissues, a review of Blake Morrison’s book about Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, two 10-year-old boys from Liverpool who abducted, tortured and murdered the toddler James Bulger in 1993.

The subsequent court case, which attracted international attention, forced the British legal system to confront the law’s darkest taboo.

“Children killing children” is a rare felony; an “aristocrat among crimes,” writes Mantel, an inverse allusion to the poverty-stricken community reeling from the Thatcher years that became the focus of moral panic and the centre of a media storm.

“If you’re working class, anyone may stare in: social workers, journalists, Blake Morrison,” she continues.

“You can be quite sure that if Thompson and Venables had been the offspring of accountants … Morrison would have been quietly shown the door.”

So far, so true. But Mantel here takes a rather surprising handbrake-turn away from Morrison — who suggests that responsibility rests not just with the culprits, but with society as a whole — towards wholesale retribution, even if she doesn’t quite arrive at that very easy, very suspect conclusion.

Mantel has the best of intentions: “Nothing that Blake Morrison adduces can convince the reader, or would convince a court, that the boys were incapable of forming intent to murder. To insist that they were so incapable diminishes them as moral beings.”

A lawyer by training, she is concerned that chipping away at a child’s status as a reasonable agent threatens to reduce childhood to a condition, an illness even, especially when those children are poor and more likely receive public scrutiny: “Why is it that from those who have least, and suffered most, even privacy is taken away?”

But hasn’t she just admitted that public scrutiny of Thompson, Venables and their community happened anyway? Indeed it did, in a manner one could charitably describe as medieval.

Besides, if Mantel thinks that the need for privacy trumps the right to fair(er) inquiry in that instance, it’s curious that she has devoted a very great deal of attention indeed to the private life of Henry VIII — a man with more deaths to his name than most — in order to at least partly explain his, shall we say, tempestuous disposition.

After suggesting, in the essay Royal Bodies, that the king was suffering with osteomyelitis — an extremely painful infection of the bone — towards the end of his reign, she writes that “historians underestimate what chronic pain can do to sour the temper and wear away the intellect.”

So a Tudor king’s misdeeds can be carefully contextualised against his ailments while two working-class children, about whom very little is known, rightly receive the full force of the English law? Though not quite hypocritical, the juxtaposition is curious.

“The more books I turn out, the more I wonder how one ever finds the courage to begin and the more I respect other people who write,” concludes Mantel in her introduction to this fine collection.

“So many volumes, so much toil, so much hope: the least we owe our writers is a dispassionate assessment and a considered response.”

In other words: if Mantel has taken the time to skewer you, be very honoured indeed.