Can these bones live? The Reith Lectures by Hilary Mantel
In the fourth of her Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel analyses how historical fiction can make the past come to life. She says her task is to take history out of the archive and relocate it in a body. "It's the novelist's job: to put the reader in the moment, even if the moment is 500 years ago." She takes apart the practical job of "resurrection", and the process that gets historical fiction on to the page. "The historian will always wonder why you left certain things out, while the literary critic will wonder why you left them in," she says. How then does she try and get the balance right?
The art and craft of resurrection
"My tendency, because I'm a contrarian, is to approach the received version with great scepticism and try to get the reader to challenge what they think they know. The problem is that people are very loyal to the first history they learned. They are very attached to what their teachers told them and they are very resistant to having this subverted, but I think it's our job to throw something new into the mixture."
Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning novels about Tudor England — Wolf Hall, and Bring Up the Bodies, are an international sensation, not just for their gripping plots and characters, but for how they bring a distant past to vivid life. They also toy with generally accepted history, by centering on the controversial figure of Thomas Cromwell.
Dame Hilary delivered the 2017 BBC Reith Lectures, about how fiction can help us understand what really happened in history.
Lecture 4 is recorded in front of an audience in Exeter, near Mantel's adopted home in East Devon, followed by a question and answer session chaired by Sue Lawley.
**Please note The Reith Lectures are not available as a podcast.
- Listen to Lecture 1: The Day Is for the Living
- Listen to Lecture 2: The Iron Maiden
- Listen to Lecture 3: Silence Grips the Town
Lecture 4: Can These Bones Live (Excerpt)
"I've never believed that fiction set in the past, or the future, is an inferior form of fiction. It demands the same attention to style and form as a story with a modern setting, and places a greater demand on the skills of placing information, and of managing complexity. Every page in a novel is a result of hundreds of tiny choices, both linguistic and imaginative, made word by word, syllable by syllable. The historical novel requires an extra set of choices – what sources to consult, what shape to cut from the big picture - what to do when the evidence is missing or ambiguous or plain contradictory. Most of these choices are invisible to the reader. You must be able to justify your decisions to the well-informed. But you won't satisfy everybody. The historian will always wonder why you left certain things out, while the literary critic will wonder why you put them in. 'Because I could,' is not a good reason. You need to know ten times as much as you tell.
Debate about historical fiction often centres on research. Is it sound? Is it necessary? Some writers – not me - say it's what you do after your story is finished. That depends on the nature of your story. Are you using real characters and events? Or are you using the past as a backdrop? In either case, I think there is a misunderstanding about what research really is."
**The producer of The Reith Lectures for the BBC is Jim Frank.
**For IDEAS this episode was produced by Dave Redel.