Giving Up The Ghost: Hilary Mantel

[poliphilo]

The first half of your life you spend collecting ghosts; in middle age you start to let them go. Breath in, pause, breath out. With any luck by the time you reach old age there won't be any of the little buggers left.

Mantel writes about her working-class childhood in Hadfield, Derbyshire and then about the illness that blighted her adult life. When she's being a child she sees things as innocently and acutely as Dickens did in the early chapters of David Copperfield; when she writes about her illness and the culpable uselessness of the medical profession she is very, very angry.

If you have a taste for Mantel's fiction this book will tell you something about the roots of her art. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean. The thing is it's a book of two halves. The tone changes when she moves from childhood to adulthood. The same thing happens with David Copperfield. It's almost as though it were two quite different books that have been soldered together.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There are good things in the second half- Rosa Dartle for instance- but David himself turns into a ghost of what he was and the plot becomes contrived and silly.

Great Expectations is the book David Copperfield should have been.