Hilary Mantel is best known for her “Wolf Hall” trilogy, but her earlier novels, which give voice to narrators in more modest, meagre circumstances, might be her most exemplary.
.” There are phantom pregnancies and infertile wombs. And then there are dead bodies. As she explains in a lecture on why she became a historical novelist, her own great-grandmother was known as “the woman who laid out the dead.” Mantel once described the genre she felt most at home in as horror. Fair enough.
In “The Giant, O’Brien,” Charles Byrne’s pain is hardly a source of power. It is, Mantel suggests, no more, and no less, than itself: pain, both enduring and to be endured. The Giant’s genius for storytelling is an art of survival, but one that becomes increasingly compromised in the course of the novel. As the Giant keeps expanding, he experiences growing pains. “My feet are enlarged,” he tells his keepers, “and I feel the springy gristle of my ankles and knees to be calcined.
In the final pages of “Giving Up the Ghost,” Mantel throws up an impossible question: “What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but to write them into being?” Instead of attempting an answer, she recounts a dream, or series of dreams, about half-finished works.
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