The essay examined how we objectify, sanctify and abuse royal women's bodies, as we've no access to their thoughts or personalities ("What does Kate read? That is a question," Mantel wonders). Her remarks ("Kate Middleton…with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished") stirred a tabloid wasps' nest for her perceived unkindness to the Duchess of Cambridge. The lecture, in fact, empathised with the Duchess. "The Daily Express is sitting outside my house," she emails her editor, in the wake of the outrage. "These are sad days for irony."
Mantel Pieces reveals the essay was in fact tame, compared to other searing pieces of criticism. Of John Osborne's bitter second memoir, Almost a Gentleman: "He is not loveable, he knows; very well, he'll be hateful then."
Of Madonna: "The received wisdom is that even if you have talent, you still need luck; even if you're lucky, without talent you'll still be found out. Madonna shows that energy can be a substitute for talent; and she has made her own luck." And a swift little kick at the beginning of a piece on Jane Boleyn: "The subject of this biography has already been fearlessly minced into fiction by the energetic Philippa Gregory."
Mantel's standards are exacting. Some writers satisfy them, like historian John Demos, whose book about a settler child captured by Native Americans is reviewed in 1994. "He has drawn the meaning from what few facts we have about Eunice Williams, by an exercise in scrupulous scholarship and imaginative sympathy." If it's well done, it's okay by Mantel if you fill in the blanks.
Others fail to meet them, like Blake Morrison's mawkish 1997 account of the James Bulger murder trial. He condescends to understand the motives of the accused working-class boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who are worthy objects for dissection because they are poor. This is disingenuous, concludes Mantel. "What if your understanding looks to me like interference, like expropriation, like colonisation? I am not sure that we should indulge ourselves in our favourite pastime of exploring the nature of evil." In this case, if yours is an inferior sensibility, filling in the blanks is a fresh crime.
The essays range across subjects: Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, the flourishing of spiritualism amid the bereavement of war, censorship in Saudi Arabia, the link between anorexia and religious hysteria, and rather too many Tudors for my liking. The most powerful pieces are personal: in Meeting my Stepfather, she writes with a mixture of innocence and prescience from the perspective of her preschool self. "Let us say, life changes at a glance," it begins, and continues in a narcotic style. You feel yourself sucked backwards and down, experiencing her confusion of adult motives and the powerlessness of childhood.
Mantel claims that as a reviewer, "I stand in for the general reader". Well, if she's the average person, I'm the Archbishop of Canterbury. This collection gleams with gem-like observations, laid out in a colourful pattern, as illuminating as any stained-glass window. This, you're left to think, is what it must be like to have a fine mind.
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from The London Review of Books by Hilary Mantel (Harper Collins, $45)
