DEveryone knew that she was seriously ill; it was part of her myth: the British writer Hilary Mantel had suffered for fifty years from endometriosis, a disease that mostly occurs in women and does not necessarily lead to death, but is still incurable. Precisely because Hilary Mantel wrested such a gigantic work from this evil handicap, the news of her death now comes as a shock. Seventy years of life – what is that today? Especially if you have just created the main work in the last fifteen.
This is of course the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the novels Wolves (2009), Falcons (2012) and Mirror and Light (2019) that made Hilary Mantel internationally famous. She made history in every respect: thematically, bringing us so close to the English Renaissance period under the reign of Henry VIII and his temporary Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell that reading it was like seeing living characters, and literary, by being the first Author was nominated for the Booker Prize, the most important English-language literary award, with all volumes of a trilogy – and also won it for the first two.
The third booker would have been well-deserved too, but what else was there to offer her besides a record for the literary history books? The trilogy has already sold millions of copies worldwide. The last volume was not only the thickest, but it also rounded off the story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell so consistently that one could think that Mantel had already written the last line in his head – a decade and a half later .
She was, however, a seasoned and established writer by the time she began writing Cromwell. With “Brüder” (originally “A Place of Greater Safety” and published in 1992, while the German translation only appeared twenty years later, after the success of “Wolfe”), she had achieved something similarly remarkable in literary terms for the French Revolution as she did later for the Tudor period. Her thousand-page kaleidoscope of voices from France made it clear for the first time what fascinated Hilary Mantel: the unpredictability of history, which from today’s perspective seems so clear in its course, but eluded the wishes of the actors of the time, despite the greatest human cleverness, planning or perfidy. How she presented it fascinated us: reading Mantel’s novels teaches us to be humble in the face of the unpredictability of history and in the author’s ability to cast it in a form that appears historically authentic and still corresponds to our current understanding of literature.
Not only a writer, but also a fighter
It all started in 1985 with a contemporary topic: “Every Day Is Mother’s Day” was the name of Hilary Mantel’s debut novel, and the malice, pointed tongues and psychological accuracy of this portrait of English (class) society already gave an idea of the analytical power of description in her subsequent books should arise. But it was not until 1995 that a novel by Mantel was published in German, “Reizklima”, and one can call it a stroke of luck for their current local publisher, DuMont, that the German public did not yet know what to do with the titles first published by Krüger and then by Fischer , so that after the English success of “Wolves” the cards could be reshuffled for licensed editions. However, as an important factor in the late success in Germany, Werner Loecher-Lawrence, Mantel’s German voice, also deserves mention.
When “Spiegel und Licht” appeared, one had the feeling of witnessing the end of an epoch; now it actually occurs, also in reality. She had explained many times that Hilary Mantel did not want to embark on another similarly extensive book. In the seven years between the second part of the trilogy and its final volume, she also used her fame to make political statements, especially against Brexit. In her description of the political intrigues of the Renaissance, which went far beyond the British Isles, she saw a plea for European understanding and the indivisibility of the common cultural heritage. Hilary Mantel, the dedicated publicist, will also be sorely missed. The woman who wrote the great British historical epic of the twenty-first century was a great cosmopolitan. And that was before her books were read all over the world.
