GIVING UP THE GHOST: A memoir

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But I noticed that this mixture of candour and reticence runs through HM’s fiction too – what I’ve read, A Place of Greater Safety and Wolf Hall. I used to imagine, I said, that I lived there, behind the shutters and balconies, that I owned those pots with the spilling scarlet flowers.

And there is Catriona, the daughter Mantel never had, a strong-shouldered girl with an Irish complexion and a wonderful knack with the material things of life - driving, money, making curtains.I knew, also, so many people who were old, so many people who were dead: I belonged to their company and lineage, not to this, and I began to want to rejoin them, without the interruptions now imposed. I don’t know who it belongs to: to me, or the boy I’ve beaten, or some ghostly, fading boy I still carry inside. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

If you remember something in a particular way, then that is where the real truth, the emotional truth, the deeper truth, actually lies. It seems in his view that, even after death, spooks don’t give up the ghost of the human impulse to endure. A near-approach had been enough for me, to those stinking closets under the shadow of a high wall, the ground running from the pipes that burst every winter, the wood of their doors rotting as if a giant rat had gnawed them from the ground up. I heard Hilary being interviewed and was grabbed by her weird life, not the usual middle-class sinuous blandishments at all.

I think if a Black and Tan came to the door looking peckish, she would probably feel sorry for him and make him a strawberry pie. In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most extraordinary feats were within her grasp. I will myself into dreaming; I think about Red Indians and about Jesus, because Jesus is a thing I am exhorted to think about and I try, I do try.

The phrase “gave up the ghost” is an old English translation of the Greek phrase “paradidōmi to pneuma. All my behaviour seemed to anger him, just by the fact of being behaviour: but silences, absences, were also a provocation to him. If you give up the ghost, you stop trying to do something, because you no longer believe that you can succeed. George’s mistook Mantel for a fellow physician because her self-diagnosis, based on her intensive, close-reading of a medical text, was correct.My grandmother was hitherto born on Valentine’s Day; my mother says that Annie Connor, being the eldest, gave out to her brothers and sisters the birthdays she thought they would like.

After Wilhelmina launches Slater, Alexis covers her eyes, Betty covers her mouth, and Daniel covers his ears, symbolising three wise monkeys.

While Mantel’s discussion of her long illness is quite well done, I found sections of the book frustratingly baroque and opaque.