Hilary Mantel

You've written short stories, memoirs and novels. Is there something in particular that made you interested in tackling historical fiction?
Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you've invented or a person who is dead. I don't think I've ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.

Of all the characters in Henry VIII's England, why focus on Thomas Cromwell?
I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell's story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I'd finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn't easy to find out anything about him, but it's in those gaps that the novelist goes to work. He's a man at the centre of everything, and yet in most fiction and drama he's pushed into the wings, and he stands there, wrapped in his black cloak, hissing and plotting. I wanted to bring him centre stage and put the spotlight on him.
 
The Tudors have inspired films and a TV series. Were you ever concerned about public expectations for a story set in that period?
The Tudors are the great national soap opera. Their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. A lot of retellings of Tudor history aren't really about Tudor history at all. I think they've been used as an excuse for a lot of cheap, popular romantic fiction. It used to be a way of writing about sex when you weren't allowed to, and now it's a way of writing about the destructiveness of families, and the rivalry between women.

Do you think blurring the boundary between history and fiction is problematic?
It's always a tension. When historians read your book they think, "Why did she leave out such and such?" and when literary critics read it they think, "Why did she bother to put it in?" You just keep your eye on the general reader, who is you by proxy. The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

I have heard you're working on a sequel to Wolf Hall.
I'm longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it's because I want to know what's going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, "How did this happen?" And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it's happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book. Deepanjana Pal

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Harper Collins, RRP$32.99

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