Hilary Mantel on The Mirror and The Light & completing a trilogy

Only two other authors have matched Coetzee’s achievement since; one is Peter Carey – picking up the award for a second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang – the other, is Hilary Mantel.

Wolf Hall (2009), and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) ensured Mantel was not only the first woman, and first British author, to win the Booker Prize twice, but also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy. 

In March 2020, Mantel joined us here at Southbank Centre to reveal the third book in this highly acclaimed trilogy, The Mirror and The Light in a special Royal Festival Hall event. Ahead of that appearance we managed to grab a few minutes with the author to discuss late-blooming, prize-winning and trilogy-writing.

There will be people who know you only as the writer of your Cromwell trilogy, but you had a long career prior to that, indeed you wrote for 12 years before publishing anything. What drove you to keep writing at that time in particular?

I think I can say that the first twelve years were the toughest. During most of that time I was living abroad and had no contacts and no way in. But I did have faith in my product, and I never expected rapid rewards. Once I broke through, I built steadily on the good reviews for my first book. Through the years I won a number of prizes, and different titles became brief best-sellers – not, of course, on the scale of the trilogy. I had a sense of making a steady but stealthy advance, and I was encouraged by the support of a select and lively group of readers. And I always had Thomas Cromwell on the horizon.

You’d written historical novels before this trilogy of course, so what was it that drew you to Thomas Cromwell? What led you to think his was a story suited to a novel?

There are shelves full of novels about the Tudors, but Thomas Cromwell, a player of critical significance, was a central absence. I looked at the difficulties that had undone his biographers over the years – principally his tendency to vanish behind the vast documentation he generated. I wondered if a novelist could do better, by applying an informed imagination to the more ambiguous aspects of his life and personality. Novelists love uncertainty.

The final book of a trilogy is usually going to be the most demanding – it has to carry the flavour of everything that went before, as well as a weight of information.’

Do you approach the final part of a trilogy differently to a stand alone novel, or indeed the prior books of the series? Are you aware of a need to tie up loose ends when writing?

The final book of a trilogy is usually going to be the most demanding – it has to carry the flavour of everything that went before, as well as a weight of information. I would hate to be thought of as someone who ties up loose ends – that might be required for detective fiction, but when your main character is a real person, suddenly dismissed from life by the axe, you want to leave your reader with a sense that something is now missing, and will always be missing – something of value has escaped. What I have tried to do is not to wrap up storylines – because they don’t end – but to carry forward the images and symbols from the early books, and let them lie, so to speak, between the lines. I do this because they are what constitutes Cromwell’s consciousness, his way of being – and they are what ends with him. 

Winning the Booker Prize not once, but twice. How did and does that feel? Did you ever envisage that happening during your early career?

I think every ambitious novelist imagines winning once. But having been a Booker judge, I know that complex, unruly calculations are involved in the final choice – it’s not a scientific process, and you can’t predict what the judges will like. And I always kept in mind that Beryl Bainbridge, one of my most admired writers, was repeatedly shortlisted but never won. 

‘I think every ambitious novelist imagines winning [the Booker] once. But I always kept in mind that Beryl Bainbridge, one of my most admired writers, was repeatedly shortlisted but never won.’

And, does being a two-time Booker Prize winner place an additional pressure at all on what you next write?

Not in my case – because I knew my task was to finish the trilogy.

And following the Mirror and the Light and the conclusion of this trilogy, what’s next for you?

I’m moving on immediately to work on the stage adaptation – and also collaborating on a photographic project, relating to the trilogy, with Ben and George Miles. The story can be told in pictures, as well as words.

Following this short interview Mantel appeared in our Royal Festival Hall on 6 March 2020 to discuss The Mirror and The Light with journalist Alex Clark. The event was recorded and subsequently put out by us as a podcast which you can listen to here, as the author reflects on the finale of one of the most compelling and celebrated trilogies of modern times, ending with a special reading of it’s concluding work.