My favourite sentence in the Wolf Hall trilogy is this:

Even in the republic of virtue, you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that his name is Cromwell.

I sat and stared at the wall for a long time after reading that. To me, it encapsulates a particular magic that the historical novel can perform. It is both inside and outside of its time, occupying several spaces at once.

Whenever writers talk about Mantel, they talk about point of view. I often quote the opening paragraph of Wolf Hall in writing workshops (and in fact, I talked about it in a writing workshop a few days ago, and was planning to explore it more in next week’s class.)

So now get up.”

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

That opening is so iconic that a billboard announcing the third book in the series only had to contain those four words. (A photo of the billboard was tweeted by the Waterstones Piccadilly account.)

One can make a convincing argument that the defining technique of novels of the current period, from about 1800 to 2022 and counting, is the use of free indirect style. What that means is that even in third person point of view, the voice of the author and the voice of the point-of-view character are frequently indistinguishable. A single sentence can be both immersive and objective, at the same time. Sentences as permeable membranes.

Mantel brought us into an experience of Thomas Cromwell so intimate that when the language does feel objective we almost feel that Cromwell himself is inhabiting that eagle-eye view of his own situation. that the narrator, that the author, that the reader, is all him, disassociating.

But there are other voices merged in that point of view as well. Take this description of the death of Anne Boleyn from The Mirror and the Light:

Few women are so resolute at the last, and not many men. He had seen her start to tremble, but only after her final prayer. There was no block, the man from Calais did not use one. She had been required to kneel upright, with no support. One of her women bound a cloth across her eyes. She did not see the sword, not even its shadow, and the blade went through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk. We all – well, most of us, not Brandon – regret that it had to come to this.

When I read that the first time, I think I said aloud, “who is we? WHO IS WE?” It blew my mind, and it still does. We is, perhaps, the people of England, or perhaps the people of the court, which suggests that they have been narrating and privy to Cromwell’s thoughts all along. Or “we” is Cromwell taking on the collective point of view of those around him, or even of the nation, which a very unusual thing for a character in fiction to do, but an interesting choice for Cromwell in particular. Note that Cromwell is written in third person, but “we” in first person. (I’ve passed over the fact that we also see through the eyes of the dying Anne Boleyn, as no one but her could ever know whether or not she saw the sword’s shadow. I absolutely love when omniscience sneaks into limited points of view. Another really cool example is The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill.)

It’s all just so interesting. The marriage of form and function is exquisite and absolutely particular to the novel.

As if all this weren’t enough, “we” is, sometimes, well, you and me. The readers of 2022. Or 2050. Or 2100. Mantel’s work refuses to be bound in time; in that way, too, her perspective is fluid and capacious. That’s what struck me about the “republic of virtue” line quoted above; it’s an obvious reference to Robespierre, who was born 218 years after Thomas Cromwell died. “…and somewhere it is written that his name is Cromwell” takes the figure of Cromwell out of his own time, out of this particular individual, and turns him into a stock character, or an immortal being, or an idea. It also binds together Mantel’s own work, connects it, comments on it. It is Mantel speaking about Mantel in Cromwell’s voice, which is our voice, which is her voice.

Here’s Mantel on Robespierre. Her novel A Place of Greater Safety has probably influenced every book about the French Revolution written since, directly or indirectly. When I was revising my own book about the French Revolution, The Embroidered Book, my editor Jack Renninson and I used Mantel’s work as a touchstone as we worked on Antoinette’s arc toward the end of the novel, referring in our conversations to certain techniques Mantel had used in bringing a character toward a death readers expect. Her use of the present tense is a huge part of the reason I used it in TEB, not out of a desire to emulate her just for the sake of emulating her, but because of the way she demonstrated the flexibility of the present tense as a tool for creating an almost dreamlike, but simultaneously visceral, sense of immersion.

This is all inadequate, and smarter people will have smarter things to say, but we have lost a writer who will be remembered when people look back on this age, if there are people to look back on it.