Getting Into Their Heads

The Man Booker prize winner is announced on 16th October. I can't see Hilary Mantel winning for 'Bring Up the Bodies'. Despite the judges' protestations that they are judging the books not the authors, it seems unlikely that they'll give the prize not just to the same author who won two years ago but for a sequel to that previous winning book. I hope I'm wrong because despite not having read any of the other short-listed books, I'm convinced Mantel should win.

This isn't just because 'Bring Up the Bodies' is a great book, although it assuredly is - tighter, better paced than 'Wolf Hall' with an even greater feel for place and period. It's because she achieves something that I had hitherto thought impossible: she gets into the heads of people who lived in another time - a time in many ways more distant from us than the 500 years on the calendar.

Mantel's two historical obsessions, Tudor England and the French Revolution (her early novel set in the Revolution, 'A Place of Greater Safety' is a worthy companion to the Tudor series), uncannily mirror my own. I'm not sure there's much to link the two periods: both saw violent upheaval and the prime movers are fascinating, even improbable, characters. But they're hardly unique in that.

Whatever it is that draws Mantel to these periods, she has an extraordinary and, in my experience, unmatched ability to understand the psychology, the motivation of those playing the game. I could never reconcile the way religion underpinned the whole Tudor period with the frankly irreligious, unchristian acts of most of the participants. I long assumed that religion was just a smokescreen, a launchpad for more temporal issues of politics, power and money. But that's clearly wrong as even the most brutally secular power-politics are underpinned by a religious sensibility that unites all the major players just as their doctrinal differences divide them. Religion matters to these people.

The genius of Mantel's writing is to reconcile the religious and the secular in her characters and still make them believably human. Maybe the novel is a better medium for this than academic history which has always been suspicious of relying too much on an understanding of the psychology and motivations of historical figures.

Mantel has no such qualms. She is able to frame the immoral (in the eyes of their God) actions of Anne Boleyn or Henry in the light of their deep religious convictions. What seems contradictory to us now is entirely convincing within the context of the book and the period.

At the heart of her achievement is an understanding that there is no opt-out clause when it comes to religion in sixteenth century England. We may see Henry or Cromwell or Anne as hypocritical, their actions a direct contradiction of their beliefs. But religion was so much a part of the fabric of their society, so much a part of how they saw themselves as individuals that it simply makes no sense to separate their actions from their beliefs.

Her Thomas Cromwell, a man who, if transplanted into the modern era, could easily pass for an amoral, atheistic exponent of realpolitik, still thinks and talks in terms of salvation, still reads his prayer book at times of stress, still cares deeply about the 'new religion'. Does he truly believe? I'm not sure even Hilary Mantel knows that. But he is as much a part of the religious culture of his time as the more obviously pious More or Cranmer.

There's a telling line when Cromwell broods on Anne's arrest:

'One thing she set out to do, this side of salvation: get Henry and keep him'

It's that 'this side of salvation' that is key. However consumed the players are by their earthly dramas, they are all played out in the wider context of a Christian universe. Henry is obsessed with the health of his soul as well as his body but there isn't a character who doesn't have one eye on the afterlife.

Mantel's understanding of the sensibility of the time and her ability to draw characters who are entirely true to that sensibility is her greatest achievement and what elevates these books to another level.