A Place of Greater Safety

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MacFarquhar, Larissa (8 October 2012). "The Dead Are Real: Hilary Mantel's Imagination". The New Yorker . Retrieved 30 December 2020. A Place of Greater Safety is a 1992 historical novel by Hilary Mantel, about the French Revolution of 1789. It was the first novel she wrote, but her third to be published. It chronicles the Revolution through the dynamic relationships between three of its central players: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. The novel is basically structured as a dramatized triple biography, covering almost the entirety of their intertwined lives from their respective formative years in the 1760s and 1770s all the way to the executions of the former two at the height of the Reign of Terror. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life – I mean, cruel people, dangerous people – why do you think they are going to be any better after they’re dead?” American readers know English writer Mantel as the author of The Giant, O'Brien, A Place of Greater Safety and other critically hailed novels. This work, a twisted romp through the lives of long-time Continue reading »

Originally published in 1989 in the U.K., Mantel's slim, intense novel displays the author's formidable gift for illuminating the darker side of the human heart, offering metaphoric and literal Continue reading » The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. If she was not available - and she was executed before him - I would invite Maximilien Robespierre. Mind you, I doubt if he would accept - he wasn't quite a recluse, but he was not a social adept. Kept his energies focussed on the task in hand, which for him, was to improve the wellbeing and lives of the poor people of France. I liked his gentility and kindness. I love the way that Hilary Mantel uses language; I am constantly surprised and delighted by her ability to capture the essence of a character or scene in just a few perfectly chosen words. Contrary to the tendency in Anglophone media to focus on the crumbling of "l'Ancien Regime," A Place of Greater Safety is explicitly told through the eyes of the revolutionaries, opting to explore the lives of the previously-unknown men and women who gained fame and infamy in the swells of the Great Revolution.The novel is written in darting, suggestive sentences; the dialogue, in all its stoical tones and elements of good and bad humour, is like a chorus, or a commentary on life and its hardships. Using hints and clues, a deceptive indirection, Mantel allows us to enter the wounded spirit of her giant and the restless mind of the inquiring and ambitious doctor-cum-bodysnatcher. Their circling of each other is conducted with slow subtlety, but also with an unsparing sense of doom.

Marvellous...It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Hilary Mantel captures it all.’ Time Out Because they live near each other, Desmoulins and Danton grow close, despite the differences in their personalities. Desmoulins is beautiful, funny, and creative, with a streak of cruelty – the novel implies that in a different historical moment he would have found himself at home in Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic circle. Danton, meanwhile, is deeply charismatic despite his extreme ugliness (his face was famously scarred by a childhood accident and smallpox). He is paranoid enough never to put any of his ideas in writing, but is also a brilliant public speaker who can inspire crowds with his hours-long electrifying speeches. The stories in Mantel's new collection reflect her interest in human frailty and assaults of all kinds, from the most intimate to those by or against the state. In fact, one title, "Offenses Against Continue reading » I had heard that the Royal Shakespeare Company was going to dramatise Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and so when, a few months down the line, I got a call asking if I’d like to play Thomas Cromwell I was excited and slightly daunted. That was the beginning of my journey with Cromwell, and also with Hilary Mantel, who I first met in the RSC rehearsal rooms. Having just read her books it really hit home what an incredible piece of work they are. In Mandel’s taut sequel to Wolf Hall, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn have been married for more than two years, but unable to produce a male heir. Boleyn’s position becomes tenuous—especially with Thomas Continue reading »The haunting sequel to Mantel's Every Day Is Mother's Day (see above) offers powerful insight into its precursor. Muriel Axon is the untouchable yet tarnished heroine here, and she selectively Continue reading » While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else. If you've learned about the French Revolution at school, you've probably assembled a jumble of facts about the dramatic actions of the revolutionaries and the mob and the outcome of it all. Hilary Mantel dives beneath that to breathe life into the characters who populated the events.

This article about a historical novel of the 1990s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian From the double Man Booker prize-winner comes an extraordinary work of historical imagination – this is Hilary Mantel’s epic novel of the French Revolution. Georges-Jacques Danton: A gifted, pragmatic, ambitious young lawyer. "Erotically ugly" and thuggish in appearance due to a violent animal husbandry incident in his childhood. Married to: Damian Lewis and Claire Foy as King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in BBC2’s Wolf Hall. Photograph: Ed Miller/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

In this well-researched book, she draws flesh and blood portraits of the leaders of the revolution and what led them to the events of that stormy time. You feel embedded in it, experiencing what drove them from crisis to crisis and directed their actions. You see their relationships, their trials and their temptations. Although the details have to be surmised, they are based on careful analysis of the writings of the real people involved, drawing out their motivations and beliefs. Maximilien Robespierre: An earnest young provincial lawyer; slight, sober, and punctilious. He is unassuming, reliable, and competent, but a bore. Abhors the sight of blood. The writing is so very good. Very Hilary Mantel. It is worth bearing in mind that this was her first - that's right - first novel and was written when she was 22 years old! In the interview that she does at the end of the Kindle version, she tells the interviewer that it nearly killed her; that she put it onto a shelf for decades before it was resurrected by new circumstances in her writing career.

When they have enough to eat and when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous tongues and pens to deceive them; when their interests are identified with the people.When last we saw Thomas Cromwell, hero of Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall, he’d successfully moved emperors, queens, courtiers, the pope, and Thomas More to secure a divorce and a Continue reading » Part one: Liberty is narrated by Lizzy Watts and Paul Ritter, dramatised by Melissa Murray and directed by Marc Beeby. In a word of warning, if you know nothing about the French Revolution, this is not the best book from which to increase your knowledge. It helped that I had some idea of dates and times and events and, to a lesser degree, persons from that cataclysmic time in the history of France. Get out your encyclopaedias, your Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy, and there is always good old Google.