Writing through the pain

British writer Hilary Mantel. Photo / Supplied

Hilary Mantel's 10th novel, Wolf Hall, is already creating an intense buzz, a high-frequency hum of the kind that Mantel herself would capture compellingly. And like everything else about her, it seems shadowed by another dimension.

After all, this is the same prize-winning English author who tells of rising in the early hours having dreamed an entire story; of typing it up and backing it up, only to wake again and find it vanished, the only evidence a printout that a nagging voice had bid her make.

Mantel was born in 1952 into a family of Irish Catholic descent. Her father was a clerk, her mother had been sent to work at the mill at the age of 12, and home was a Derbyshire village. When she was 7, Mantel had a life-changing encounter with evil at the bottom of the garden, down among the weeds. Reflecting on the difficulties of writing about it in her memoir, Giving up the Ghost, she pre-empts reader expectations of sexual abuse. "That's the usual horror. Mine is more diffuse. It wrapped a strangling hand around my life and I don't know how or what it was."

Almost invisible, soundless and scentless, she recalls it as a slight disturbance in the air, a presence "high as a child of 2". Somehow, she felt it enter her. Filled with secrets, lies and ghosts, that memoir, published in 2003, reads like a source book for her fiction, a book of spells, perhaps. She never saw her father again after her mother replaced him with their lodger. They moved to a small town in Cheshire where they all took the lodger's surname despite there being no legal divorce. Mantel gave up going to church when she was about 12 but had stopped believing before then. She attended a convent school, going on to read law at the London School of Economics.

A year later, she transferred to Sheffield to be with Gerald, the geology student she would soon marry. By then, the pain had begun. At 19, she consulted a doctor about the aches in her legs and persistent lethargy. Her symptoms were dealt with as if they were mental - with anti-depressants, Valium, anti-psychotic pills that actually made her psychotic. The side-effects of each pill were treated with more pills; at one point, she was sent to hospital.

Confined to bed she wrote a story, all about a woman who believes her baby to be a changeling. When she told her psychiatrist about it, he forbade her to continue. The experience left Mantel convinced of just one thing: she must never go near a psychiatrist or a psychotropic drug again. Meanwhile, the pain persisted. So did the writing. In 1977, Gerald accepted a posting to Botswana. In the African heat, she was capable of nothing more than sitting on the sofa with her notebook, jotting down a narrative set during the French Revolution.

When the pain became unbearable she retreated into medical textbooks, which is how she came to diagnose herself with endometriosis. The illness was perilously advanced by the time doctors confirmed it. Christmas week of 1979 found her back in London, in St George's Hospital, being operated on, or, as she puts it in Giving up the Ghost, "having my fertility confiscated and my insides rearranged".

Shortly afterwards her marriage unravelled (she divorced, though later remarried Gerald) and she developed a mild addiction to barbiturates. Yet without the illness, she probably wouldn't have begun writing, she says. Something else helped: reading Sanity, Madness and the Family by RD Laing. Mantel still wonders how those case studies' stories ended. The book gave her the confidence to tell the stories she knew. "If I wanted to be a writer, I didn't have to worry about inventing material; I'd already got it. The next stage was just to find some words." The novel she wrote in Botswana wasn't published for some years. Her official debut sprang from that story about the changeling.

Every Day is Mother's Day appeared in 1985 and told of an agoraphobic clairvoyant, her sullen daughter and their social worker. Its fans included Booker-winning novelist Penelope Lively. Her second novel, Vacant Possession, was a sequel. Her third, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, described the plight of women under the Saudi regime, drawing on her experience of being posted there with Gerald.

Mantel's fiction has since roamed from psychological suspense to mystery and political thrillers and a coming-of-age tale. Her novel Beyond Black is the story of a psychic who channels the dead's views on their relatives' new kitchen units. In private, she is haunted by her violent childhood and prodded and poked - literally - by a coarse spirit guide who sounds decidedly human.

Conceived in the eerie wake of Princess Diana's death and set around the turn of the millennium, the novel's middle England backdrop is a place of orbital road systems and starter homes, creepily disconnected. Though Beyond Black was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Mantel has grumbled about being responded to as woman writer. As she told Rachel Cooke in the Observer: "When you write, you're not either sex. But when you're read, you're definitely gendered." Attempts to define Mantel and her work invariably fall short. Northern Gothic? Not really.

Even isolating its components can be tricky. Take her pitchy humour: as one critic noted, "wit" doesn't convey the half of it. "Mantel is dreadfully funny - funny with an evil streak, as things are when you pass through the membrane of normality; funny like slapstick at a funeral." So what can be said of the novels? Well, they are unflinching. They are also exuberant yet spare, dispassionate yet poignant, and kind in places, even though spite seems to be the emotion that best sums up her characters.

There are broad themes, too. Peer beyond the spectral trappings and you'll find incisive meditations on the nature of belonging and the dynamics of power. Both feature prominently in Wolf Hall, which centres on the first Cromwell - Thomas, aide to Henry VIII - and majestically conjures up an England in the throes of epic change. It is, you could say, a Great British Novel, one that re-ties links to history, links that had appeared severed in the middle England of Beyond Black.

* Wolf Hall is released on Monday (4th Estate $36.99)

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