Hilary Mantel wins 2012 Costa novel prize - BBC News BBC News Hilary Mantel wins 2012 Costa novel prize 2 January 2013 Close share panel Image caption Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies also won the Booker Prize in 2012 Hilary Mantel has won the 2012 Costa novel prize for her Booker Prize-winning book Bring Up The Bodies. The judges described the historical story as "quite simply the best novel of the year". Kathleen Jamie won the poetry category for her collection The Overhaul beating newcomer Sean Borodale. Each winner will receive a £5,000 prize. Maggot Moon by the former illustrator Sally Gardiner took the Children's award. The book sees her hero Standish take a stand against a ruthless regime which has taken his friend away. The judges called it "truly outstanding with a unique voice, it's a magnificent book." Sally Gardiner has described the award as "the most phenomenal" experience since becoming a full time writer. "Maggot Moon is a book I've always wanted to write and Standish has been waiting to be written for years.

It is thrilling that the story now stands defiant in the world" she said. "It is a great honour to have won this award, and for me, it goes towards proving the power of dreams.' Husband and wife team Mary and Bryan Talbot from Sunderland jointly won best biography for the graphic novel Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. It is part personal history, part biography and tells the story of two interweaving father-daughter relationships. Graphic novels were included in the shortlists for the Costa Book Awards for the first time in 2012. Media captionHilary Mantel said the "good Devon air" helped her write Bring Up The Bodies which won the Costa Book Prize 2012 It is Hilary Mantel's second award for Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, which also won the 2012 Man Booker Prize. She became the first living UK author to receive the prize twice, having won it for its prequel Wolf Hall. "I'm delighted, it is lovely and this is the first time I've have featured on a Costa shortlist I think, I've certainly never won one of the Costa prizes before" she told the BBC.

Mantel said the awards were not making her complacent: "I'm always greedy for readers, like every author. "I had a letter from one the other day which confused Thomas Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell and when that is going on, I think there is work to be done." Mantel beat off competition from James Meek's The Heart Broke In and Stephen May's Life! Death! Prizes! Debut author Francesca Segal won the first novel category for The Innocents. It is the story of childhood sweethearts, preparing to get married when a cousin turns up and puts temptation in one of their ways. "It felt hard to believe that this affectionate, witty novel was the author's first," the judges said. All five books, which were selected from more than 550 entries, will now compete for the 2012 Costa Book of the Year, which will be announced in London on 29 January. A panel of judges including actress Jenny Agutter, comedian Mark Watson and chaired by the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster, Dame Jenni Murray will decide which is the overall winner - who will receive an additional £30,000 prize money.

Last year's Costa Book Prize went to Andrew Miller for his novel, Pure. Hilary Mantel's Booker novels get stage treatment - Telegraph Booker Prize Hilary Mantel's Booker novels get stage treatment Man Booker Prize novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies are being turned into stage plays, Hilary Mantel has announced. British author Hilary Mantel after winning the 2012 Man Booker literary prize for her novel "Bring Up The Bodies" in London Photo: REUTERS By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor 12:32PM BST 17 Oct 2012 Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize -winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, are being adapted for the stage. The two productions are under consideration by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the intention is to stage the two plays over the same season. Speaking backstage at the Man Booker Prize ceremony, where she became the first British author to win the award twice, Mantel gave details of the theatre adaptations. A BBC Two costume drama based on the books is also in the works. The stage versions have been written by Mike Poulton, who has worked with the RSC for many years.

His other credits including the award-winning 2005 adaptation of Schiller’s Don Carlos, starring Sir Derek Jacobi, and last year’s production of Luise Miller at the Donmar. Related Articles We had to find the novel of the year 18 Oct 2012 Mantel said: “I went to a first reading last week. There’s still a great deal of work to do but what we’re hoping for is two plays - a Wolf Hall play and a Bring Up The Bodies play - which, if you liked, you could see on consecutive evenings.” The RSC is “not committed but certainly interested”, she added. A spokesman for the company said the plays were “on our list of considerations”. As for the BBC series, Mantel would not be drawn on her dream casting for Thomas Cromwell. “I have sworn that I will not issue a wish-list. The whole thing about casting is so incredibly complicated because there’s so much to be considered about people’s availability and we are not near casting it yet,” she said. “It has been written by Peter Straughan, who did Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

It will be six episodes, he’s part-way through writing and cracking on at a great pace.” Mantel revealed that she had turned down the idea of a full-length film in favour of the BBC Two production. “There were approaches about a cinema version but we felt that the complexity of the subject matter would be better served by a treatment in six episodes, perhaps later moving on to a second series,” she said. Mantel, 60, was asked after the ceremony about finding success relatively late in life. She wrote her first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, when she was 22 but had to wait until 2009 for Wolf Hall to bring her popular acclaim. She said: “My publishers were always announcing my ‘breakthrough book’ but it never really happened. It happened in terms of critical esteem, but it didn’t happen in terms of sales or impact on the general public. “My fortunes began to turn when I met Thomas Cromwell.” Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize for ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ - The Washington Post Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize for ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost.

Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! Got it Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the home country of author Peter Carey. He is from Australia, not Austria. LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 16: Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize 2012 with her book 'Bring Up The Bodies' at The Guildhall on October 16, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images) (Ben Pruchnie/GETTY IMAGES) By Ron Charles October 16, 2012 Follow @roncharles Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night, becoming the first British writer and the first woman to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award more than once. Mantel took home the 50,000-pound (about $82,000) prize for “ Bring Up the Bodies ,” the second volume of her planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII.

Her first volume, “ Wolf Hall ,” won the Booker in 2009 and was a bestseller in the United States. Oddsmakers in Britain, who follow the literary prize intensely, had predicted Mantel would win and placed journalist Will Self as a close second. His novel “Umbrella,” about an elderly woman in a psychiatric hospital, will be published in the United States in January by Grove. At the ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall on Tuesday, Mantel walked to the podium to accept her award and said: “You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize. Two come along at once.” In Wendy Smith’s review in The Washington Post earlier this year, she called “Bring Up the Bodies” “a darkly magnificent sequel.” The story covers Cromwell’s brutal efforts to engineer the beheading of Queen Anne Boleyn and Henry’s new marriage to Jane Seymour. ”Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel” by Hilary Mantel. (Henry Holt & Co.) “Mantel animates history with a political and psychological ­acuity equal to Tolstoy’s in ‘War and Peace’ (and she might have the edge on Count Leo in politics),” Smith wrote.

“Sardonic humor, particularly in scenes with not-nearly-as-dumb-as-she-seems Jane Seymour, leavens the ominous mood. Gruffly com­passionate toward villains and ­victims alike, Mantel reveals their weaknesses and cruelties bundled up in a flawed humanity we share. The most flawed and human of all is Cromwell, who in the summer of 1536 defies his enemies and covertly rational­izes the bodies he has piled up.” The other finalists for the prize included: Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies - BBC News BBC News Man Booker Prize won by Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies By Tim Masters Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News 16 October 2012 From the section Entertainment & Arts comments Close share panel Media captionHilary Mantel was announced as the winner at London's Guildhall Hilary Mantel has won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, which won the prize in 2009. Mantel is the first woman and the first living British author to win the prestigious literary prize twice.

"This double accolade is uniquely deserved," said Sir Peter Stothard, chairman of the judges. The book is about Thomas Cromwell, an adviser to King Henry VIII, and charts the bloody downfall of Anne Boleyn. It is the second book in a trilogy. A third instalment, to be called The Mirror and the Light, will continue Cromwell's story until his execution in 1540. Mantel was announced as the winner at London's Guildhall on Tuesday night. Mantel's win also makes her the first person in Man Booker history to win the prize for a direct sequel. She is only the third double winner of the award, after JM Coetzee and Peter Carey. Receiving her award, she joked: "You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize and two come along at once." She added: "I know how privileged and lucky I am to be standing here tonight. I regard this as an act of faith and a vote of confidence." As well as the £50,000 cheque she also receives £2,500 for being shortlisted, along with the other five novelists in the race.

Media captionHilary Mantel: What I'm trying to do is make three books that stand up independently Sir Peter said that the judges had made their final decision on Tuesday after a "lengthy and forensic examination". He said: "This is a very remarkable piece of English prose that transcends the work already written by a great English prose writer. "This is a bloody story about the death of Anne Boleyn, but Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her power of prose to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life." He added: "She has recast the most essential period of our modern English history; we have the greatest modern English prose writer reviving possibly one of the best known pieces of English history.

"It is well-trodden territory with an inevitable outcome, and yet she is able to bring it to life as though for the first time." Asked whether the book qualified as a thriller, Sir Peter referenced The Godfather: "You can see as much Don Corleone in this book as DH Lawrence." Man Booker Prize - 2012 shortlist Tan Twan Eng - The Garden of Evening Mists Deborah Levy - Swimming Home Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies Alison Moore - The Lighthouse Will Self - Umbrella Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis Mantel's latest work has been widely praised. The Telegraph noted its "descriptive immediacy", while Margaret Atwood wrote in the Guardian "literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as ever." Jonathan Ruppin, web editor at Foyles bookshops, said: "Bring Up the Bodies has remained a strong seller since it was published in May, but this rare double Man Booker win confirms her output as essential reading. "Mantel has been writing superb fiction for much longer than she has been winning major awards, so many readers will soon discover that she is their new favourite author.

There's every possibility she might pull off a unique treble when she completes the trilogy." The impact on sales for a Man Booker winner is considerable - every winning book since 1996 has grossed more than £1m. Yan Martel's Life of Pi, which won in 2002, made just under £10m. Last year's winner, Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, has sold 300,000 copies so far. According to the latest figures, Mantel's Bring up the Bodies has sold 108,342 copies, which is more than the other 11 Man Booker longlisted novels combined. Mantel was previously longlisted in 2005 for Beyond Black. She was a judge for the prize in 1990 when AS Byatt won with Possession.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel on iBooks Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Award The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason.

To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head? Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012 From Publishers Weekly Apr 02, 2012 – 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 new, younger queen for his patron, Henry the VIII. Now, in the second book of a planned trilogy, Cromwell, older, tired, with more titles and power, has to get Henry out of another heirless marriage. The historical facts are known: this is not about what happens, but about how.

And armed with street smarts, vast experience and connections, a ferociously good memory, and a patient taste for revenge, Mantel’s Cromwell is a master of how. Like its predecessor, the book is written in the present tense, rare for a historical novel. But the choice makes the events unfold before us: one wrong move and all could be lost. Also repeated is Mantel’s idiosyncratic use of “he:” regardless of the rules of grammar, rest assured “he” is always Cromwell. By this second volume, however, Mantel has taught us how to read her, and seeing Cromwell manipulate and outsmart the nobles who look down on him, while moving between his well-managed domestic arrangements and the murky world of accusations and counteraccusations is pure pleasure. Cromwell may, as we learn in the first volume, look “like a murderer,” but he’s mighty good company. © Publishers Weekly by eyenoise This is a wonderful novel but I regret purchasing it as an iBook. The introduction includes a series of family trees which have not been formatted for the iPad and are therefore essentially illegible. The same charts are very easy to read in the hardcover version of the book.

The publisher did a disservice to readers and the author by not spending the time to properly format the book for the iPad. Format corrected by Anonimouse4 An earlier comment says the family trees at the beginning of the book are illegible. That problem seems to have been corrected. Not worth the effort by Gmblackcar I really enjoyed "Wolf Hall" and was looking forward to reading this book. However, it's written in such a different style that I'd be hard pressed to believe that the author is the same one. The dialogue is difficult at best to follow, or to determine at times who is speaking. Characters are referred to by more than one name which also makes for confusion. I have read many books about the Tudors. I gave up on this one after reading only half, hoping that things would get better. They did not. Would not recommend this at all. Customers Also Bought Project MUSE - Bring on the Books: The Man Booker Prize for 2012 Bring on the Books: The Man Booker Prize for 2012 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Bring on the Books: Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies.

Henry Holt and Co., 2012. 432 pages. $28; Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists. Weinstein Books, 2012. 352 pages. $15.99 pb; Will Self, Umbrella. Grove Press, 2013. 448 pages. $25; Deborah Levy, Swimming Home. Bloomsbury USA, 2012. 176 pages. $14 pb; Alison Moore, The Lighthouse. Salt Publishing, 2012. 192 pages. £8.99 pb; Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis. Penguin Press HC, 2012. 304 pages. $25.95. The announcement on October 16 that Hilary Mantel had won the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring Up The Bodies produced a complicated reaction. That Mantel might win was not a great surprise.

Named [End Page 473] the favorite as soon as the shortlist came out in September, she was still considered joint front-runner (together with Will Self for Umbrella) as the decision approached. And yet a Booker for Bring Up the Bodies was unprecedented in several ways. Since she had won in 2009 for Wolf Hall, this made Mantel a double winner. There have been only two double winners—J. M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. Coetzee is South African; Carey, Australian—both men. So Mantel became the first English novelist to achieve the prize twice and the first woman. Carey and Coetzee have shown that nothing rules out a double winner, but still it is rare. Salman Rushdie reportedly threw a tantrum in 1983 when he did not win the prize for Shame, only two years after taking the prize for Midnight's Children, and many observers agreed that he had been mistreated. Such former winners as Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt continue to appear on the shortlist.

Carey was shortlisted for what would have been his third Booker in 2011, and the double winner Coetzee was on the shortlist when Mantel won it in 2009. That the new repeater was an English woman may have redeemed some oversight by previous judging committees. Mantel pronounced herself astonished and made a small joke: "You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once." Perhaps more unusual, or controversial, is that Bring Up The Bodies is the second installment of what will be a trilogy—in other words a sequel to Wolf Hall. As Sameer Rahim writes in his report for the Telegraph: "During the dinner all the discussion was about whether the judges could dare give it to Mantel once more and for a novel in the same series—something unprecedented in Booker history." Pat Barker won the prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, which was also part of a trilogy; but it was the concluding volume, and neither of its predecessors had won (or even been on the list).

The chair of judges, Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, ignored the possible controversy of re-recognizing Mantel, declined to reveal the vote, and only said that the panel had decided to give the prize to "a very remarkable piece of prose that transcends the work already written by a great author. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life then." Finally, though very muted in this case, there are always murmurs about historical fiction. Historical novels have won a large number of (Man) Booker Prizes over the years, and there is a small but insistent critical voice that decries this fact, arguing that historical fiction is escapist and demonstrates a timid refusal to confront and represent the world in which we are all now living. Perhaps its prestige-challenged near-relative, the historical romance, infects the historical novel with its dubious reputation. Of course distinguishing between the two is not always easy, nor is there any agreement on how far back a novel has to be set to be a historical one. At any rate three novels on the 2012 shortlist are at least partly of that genre.

Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists is set in Malaya and moves back [End Page 474] and forth between about 1940 and 1986. Self 's Umbrella... Access options available: Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel | Macmillan Bring Up the Bodies Powells WINNER OF THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE The sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down.

Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head?

Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012 The Independent (UK) Best Books of the Year, Cleveland Plain Dealer's Best Books of the Year, Audie Award Winner, Women's Prize for Fiction - Shortlist, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, Man Booker Prize Winner, Costa Book Award - Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlist, NPR Best Book of the Year, Washington Post Best Books of the Year, Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year, USA Today Best Books of the Year CONNECT WITH Falcons Wiltshire, September 1535 His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell...

Watch Trailer for Wolf Hall (BBC/PBS Masterpiece) Watch the trailer for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall! Wolf Hall premieres January 21st on BBC 2 in the UK and April 5th on PBS Masterpiece in the USA. Reviews Praise for Bring Up the Bodies “Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real...In short, this novelist has the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.” —The New Yorker “[Bring Up the Bodies] is astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history, the antique formulations and brocaded sentimentality of costume drama novels, so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid , strange and brand new.” —The New York Times Book Review “Two years ago something astonishingly fair happened in the world of prestigious prizes: the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for 2009 both went to the right winner.

The book was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and it would have dwarfed the competition any year…It was a hard act to follow. But the follow-up is equally sublime…That ironic ending will be no cliffhanger for anyone even remotely familiar with Henry VIII's trail of carnage. But in Bring Up the Bodies it works as one. The wonder of Ms. Mantel's retelling is that she makes these events fresh and terrifying all over again.” —The New York Times “Bring Up the Bodies isn't just her boldest book; it's also her best -- and it reaffirms Mantel's reputation as one of England's greatest living novelists.” —NPR “Hilary Mantel made waves in 2009 with her Man Booker Prize-winning page-turner, Wolf Hall…The second in her planned trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies stalks Anne Boleyn and the soap-opera worthy machinations of Cromwell and his evil allies to bring down the powerful wife of the king.

Who knew history could be so sexy?” —Vanity Fair “What's being called the Wolf Hall Trilogy is a remarkable work in progress, a series that makes the past feel immediate and--this is the best part--unpredictable. Even if you know the history, you'll find yourself racing through these pages to find out what happens next.” —People “After pulling off this literary feat twice, you realize the smartest person in the room isn't Cromwell after all--it's Mantel.” —The Huffington Post “the finest works of historical fiction in contemporary literature.” —The Washington Post “Fans of Wolf Hall will relish this book, but Bring Up the Bodies also stands alone…Her characters are real and vivid people who bring to life the clash of ideals that gripped England at the time.

She makes the past present and vital.” —The Economist “Bring Up the Bodies stands magnificently on its own...such is [Mantel's] skill” —LA Times “You won't be able to tear your eyes away.” —The Seattle Times “The worst that can be said about Mantel--her latest book makes you angry, because you want more.” —Slate “In Mantel's hands, Cromwell's cunning, morally complicated orchestration of that historic slice through the royal neck is as exciting as any thriller.” —Entertainment Weekly “With wit, daring style, and a staggering breadth of historical knowledge, Mantel breathes new life into reclaimed territory.” —Bookslut Reviews from Goodreads Bring Up the Bodies: A Review and Interview With Booker Prize-winning Author Hilary Mantel | The Huffington Post Bring Up the Bodies: A Review and Interview With Booker Prize-winning Author Hilary Mantel 05/09/2012 05:14 pm ET | Updated Jul 09, 2012 Ilana Teitelbaum Author Tudor England during the reign of Henry VIII is a place readers have visited many times--but in the hands of Hilary Mantel, it becomes territory both

 new and unsettling.

In Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Mantel weaves a richly textured world that is at once deeply foreign and entirely relevant, coalescing around the single thing that over centuries remains unchanged: the driving passions of people, even those who are kings. Through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a man of formidable intellect, the psychological and political complexities of the court are unraveled for inspection. And as ever, Mantel's virtuoso use of language serves to paint images so compelling as to take root in the imagination. Here the downfall of Anne Boleyn is remade into a chilling suspense story despite its age-old ending. As the characters dance toward their inevitable fates at the chopping block, the reader feels suspense because they do; Thomas Cromwell orchestrates events that lead to Anne's death because otherwise, chances are good that she will do the same to him. Erotic desire and violent death are a constant, powerful undercurrent despite their subtle deployment. It is almost astonishing the way these books, which do not contain a single sex scene, are so erotically charged throughout.

In Wolf Hall, the king was so driven by his desire for Anne to utterly upend the churches of England; a desire so intense that it seems to seep from the pages, evoking a tension that is at once exquisite and palpable. Now in Bring Up the Bodies, the whispers at court subtly insinuate sexual possibilities as everyone is preoccupied with Anne's body: watching for signs of pregnancy, listening for signs of adultery. The novels are equally driven by the spectre of violent death. Beneath the pageantry and courtesies of Henry's court, Cromwell is constantly aware of the fate of his beloved former master Cardinal Wolsey, as well as that of others who were obstacles to the king. However jovial and kind Henry may seem at times, he is responsible for a succession of heads mounted on pikes -- heads of men whose crime was to stand in the way of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. When Henry's desire finds a new focus in Jane Seymour and he begins to wish for an end to Anne, Cromwell sees an opportunity to save himself from falling victim to Anne's schemes.

As Cromwell's ruthless plotting escalates, and the body count of the men he aims to destroy increases, a reader's horror at his actions must be intermixed with an awareness that the threat of execution is very real; for Cromwell, it is kill or be killed. Lest we forget, there are those gray severed heads, still rotting. There is the skull of the once-revered Thomas More, now picked clean. In such a world -- where sexuality is pervasive but seldom seen, and death threatens even the most powerful -- truth becomes inextricably entangled with imagination. To this day, most historians agree that the case against Anne and her lovers was thin at best. Yet through the use of his imagination, mingled with the conjecture of others, Cromwell fashions a reality in which Anne's adultery is suddenly plausible. Cromwell imagines Anne's hypothetical motivations so vividly, it is as if his plottings are a parallel to the same mechanism employed by a writer of historical fiction. No one can know for certain the thoughts and feelings of historical figures -- but from extant evidence and an understanding of human nature, a writer can extrapolate, inventing an imagined reality that is convincing in every detail.

We see this firsthand, as Cromwell sets out to write the story of Anne Boleyn -- and use it to bring about her death. An Interview with Hilary Mantel Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of 10 previous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies is the second in her Wolf Hall trilogy. Among her other novels are A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. An Experiment in Love was the winner of the 2006 Hawthornden Prize. Mantel's reviews and essays appear in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. She lives in England with her husband. This is your first trilogy. What is it about the figure of Cromwell that drew you to devote three novels to his life? It was intended to be just one! I thought Wolf Hall would encompass his whole story. On paper, as a proposal, it had a good narrative shape and looked satisfying. But that's the torment and joy of writing fiction.

The decisions you've taken upfront go out of the window when you actually begin work and the complexity and the depth of the material begins to reveal itself. You must jettison your tidy plans and respond to its demands. I think both the man and his time are fascinating, and also the ways in which he was typical of his time and the ways in which he was ahead of it. I've always been intrigued by ambition (which, in the Tudor mind, was a vice.) Perhaps it's because it's an important part of my own make-up. I'm not particularly competitive (especially not in respect of other authors) but ever since I can remember I've wanted to push out the limits of what I could be and do. I gravitate to characters who have the same impulses. When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats, I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity. It's the journey from nowhere to somewhere that fascinates me. Though, of course, their stories are bigger than my story, which is, after all, only the unexceptional tale of someone doing a bit better than you might have predicted when she was a child.

The people I write about are going to make a mark on history, transform the outer world while they're transforming their inner world. With the revolutionaries, you could say they were riding the tide of their times. Thomas Cromwell, by contrast, was born into a world that was firmly hierarchical. Yet he began as the son of a brewer, and ended as Earl of Essex. You have to ask, "How did he do it?" Your body of work is extraordinarily diverse, ranging from historical fiction to contemporary novels. Has it been challenging to stay focused on a project that is so vast, for so long? On the contrary. I've found I'm built for the long haul. Much of the book serves to humanize Cromwell, giving him understandable motivations for his actions -- self-preservation, the stability of England, vengeance for the downfall of Wolsey. Yet the graphic scenes of execution and their aftermath undermine Cromwell's humanity, provoking a complex response. Is he a hero or a villain? I don't think he has to be either.

I just want my reader to ask, "If I were Cromwell, in these circumstances -- and if I had his wit and determination -- what would I do?" Anne Boleyn was, at the least, a threat to his policies, a cog on his diplomatic aims; he told the Spanish ambassador that she was also a danger to his life. Faced with the juggernaut of Anne's implacable will, not many of us would consent to curl up and be squashed. And of course, we mustn't forget the main driver of these events: the king himself. When Henry wanted a new wife, his minister's job was to get him one. Wolsey had failed, and the example of Wolsey was always before Thomas Cromwell. I love the way art of the period such as the tapestries, the Hans Holbein painting of Cromwell, and Italian paintings, are woven into the story. Was a study of period art integral to your research? I wanted to establish a hinterland for my characters, a cultural awareness for them as well as a political awareness.

Holbein is such an interesting figure because he gives a face to Henry's court, and he doesn't just depict these people, he interprets them for us; he makes us see them though his eyes, for better or worse. Cromwell had been in Italy and he had no doubt looked at more paintings himself than his English contemporaries had; in Florence, Venice, Rome, he will have been surrounded by Renaissance opulence and novelty. And he'd been in the cloth trade; he looks at texture and drape and weave and prices the wearer, he looks at a color and knows how the cloth is dyed and what the fixative is. I think this is an essential task with every character in fiction, to perceive the world through their senses. I didn't deliberately say to myself, "This month I will learn the art." It's more that I became involved in looking. And I remember I used to say to would-be writers, "You don't know your character till you can feel his clothes on your back." I think I was unconsciously preparing for Cromwell.

The sharp contrast between the ambitious, sexual Anne Boleyn and the meek, virginal Jane Seymour seems like a distillation of the medieval view of women, and makes Anne's fate seem all the more inevitable. That's true; they seem to come from a manual of moral tales. Anne seems to embody nightmare: she's the seductress, the poisoner, the woman who makes her man impotent with one poisoned glance. But the canny reader may think back to Wolf Hall. When Anne found a drawing in her bed of a woman without a head, who was it who was in charge of turning back the her covers that evening? I've always suspected that Jane Seymour must have been smarter and nastier than we imagine. Did you feel trepidation approaching the subject of the Tudors, which has been so widely depicted in art and entertainment? It gave me pause, but once you start work, you forget about other people's versions. You go back to first principles.

As a girl I never had enough to read, so I would borrow my mother's library books and read romances about medieval queens and Tudor queens and all sorts of men and women who wore costumes rather than clothes and said "Prithee," and "By my faith!" but had 20th-century thoughts. Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. There are, of course, a few glorious exceptions, but on the whole, those shelves and shelves of fiction about the Tudors don't contain much that is inspiring. I thought I could do better. Hindsight and art are what primarily give a form to history. How do Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies diverge from history in the service of art? Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. I drive my people forward, telling their story in the present tense as it unfolds, and always mindful that if we know the ending, they don't. Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. But I try to make up on the basis of the best evidence I can get.

To me, there is no point in willfully distorting the record. The truth (if it can be got) is stranger and more interesting than anything you could make up. The court of Henry VIII seems so rife with treachery and gossip. How much of that depiction was a creative choice? The importance of "faction" at Henry's court is a big topic with Tudor historians, but what's evident is the fluid nature of the groups: alliances form and reform, and in this case the plotters, whose natural interests are not identical, come together for the common purpose of bringing down the Boleyns. Someone has to perform the conjuring trick that makes them coalesce, and it looks as if that was Thomas Cromwell, moving smoothly between one group and the next. When you try to get a fix on the events of April and May 1536, what you quickly discover is the slippery nature of the facts. Cromwell had very little evidence against Anne, and yet his contemporaries were not incredulous, as we are, about the charges against her. They may or may not have believed she was a plural adulterer, but they didn't find the whole notion beyond belief.

It is as if Cromwell knew how to thicken the fog, mobilize the power of rumor, so that everyone was afraid and everyone spilled their secrets in an effort to save themselves. Will you be sorry to say goodbye to Cromwell at the end of the trilogy? If I do my job properly, the reader will be as bereft as I am. This review and interview originally appeared in a special Maximum Shelf edition of Shelf Awareness. Follow Ilana Teitelbaum on Twitter: More: Project MUSE - Bring on the Books: The Man Booker Prize for 2012 The Man Booker Prize for 2012 Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies. Henry Holt and Co., 2012. 432 pages. $28; Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists. Weinstein Books, 2012. 352 pages. $15.99 pb; Will Self, Umbrella. Grove Press, 2013. 448 pages. $25; Deborah Levy, Swimming Home. Bloomsbury USA, 2012. 176 pages. $14 pb; Alison Moore, The Lighthouse.

Salt Publishing, 2012. 192 pages. £8.99 pb; Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis. Penguin Press HC, 2012. 304 pages. $25.95. The announcement on October 16 that Hilary Mantel had won the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring Up The Bodies produced a complicated reaction. That Mantel might win was not a great surprise. Named [End Page 473] the favorite as soon as the shortlist came out in September, she was still considered joint front-runner (together with Will Self for Umbrella) as the decision approached. And yet a Booker for Bring Up the Bodies was unprecedented in several ways. Since she had won in 2009 for Wolf Hall, this made Mantel a double winner. There have been only two double winners—J. M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. Coetzee is South African; Carey, Australian—both men. So Mantel became the first English novelist to achieve the prize twice and the first woman. Carey and Coetzee have shown that nothing rules out a double winner, but still it is rare.

Salman Rushdie reportedly threw a tantrum in 1983 when he did not win the prize for Shame, only two years after taking the prize for Midnight's Children, and many observers agreed that he had been mistreated. Such former winners as Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt continue to appear on the shortlist. Carey was shortlisted for what would have been his third Booker in 2011, and the double winner Coetzee was on the shortlist when Mantel won it in 2009. That the new repeater was an English woman may have redeemed some oversight by previous judging committees. Mantel pronounced herself astonished and made a small joke: "You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once." Perhaps more unusual, or controversial, is that Bring Up The Bodies is the second installment of what will be a trilogy—in other words a sequel to Wolf Hall.

As Sameer Rahim writes in his report for the Telegraph: "During the dinner all the discussion was about whether the judges could dare give it to Mantel once more and for a novel in the same series—something unprecedented in Booker history." Pat Barker won the prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, which was also part of a trilogy; but it was the concluding volume, and neither of its predecessors had won (or even been on the list). The chair of judges, Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, ignored the possible controversy of re-recognizing Mantel, declined to reveal the vote, and only said that the panel had decided to give the prize to "a very remarkable piece of prose that transcends the work already written by a great author. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life then." Finally, though very muted in this case, there are always murmurs about historical fiction.

Historical novels have won a large number of (Man) Booker Prizes over the years, and there is a small but insistent critical voice that decries this fact, arguing that historical fiction is escapist and demonstrates a timid refusal to confront and represent the world in which we are all now living. Perhaps its prestige-challenged near-relative, the historical romance, infects the historical novel with its dubious reputation. Of course distinguishing between the two is not always easy, nor is there any agreement on how far back a novel has to be set to be a historical one. At any rate three novels on the 2012 shortlist are at least partly of that genre. Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists is set in Malaya and moves back [End Page 474] and forth between about 1940 and 1986. Self 's Umbrella occupies three different temporal planes—2010, 1971, and 1918.

The difference, perhaps, is that Mantel offers no framing; nobody is looking back from our present at the events of the 1530s—or at least none of her fictional characters—though of course we are, and we readers know what will happen. Together with Tan and Mantel and Self, the shortlist consists of Deborah Levy's Swimming Home, Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, and Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis. The judges, aside from Stothard, were Dinah Birch, an English professor at the University of Liverpool; Amanda Foreman, a historian; Bharat Tandon, an academic and Jane Austen specialist; and Dan Stevens, a young actor best known as Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. His qualifications for judging the Booker seem slender, though he read English at Cambridge and acted in The Line of Beauty, based on Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winner of 2004; and the jury always includes one or more representatives of the general public. The shortlist they chose includes two first novels, Narcopolis and The Lighthouse.

It includes a surprising three novels from small independent publishers: The Garden of Evening Mists was published by Myrmidon Press of Newcastle, The Lighthouse by Salt Publishing in Norfolk, and Swimming Home by a company in Buckhamshire called And Other Stories, initially sold by subscription. Finally two of the shortlisted authors (I believe this is a first) are recovered heroin addicts. As Rahim points out, this shortlist "has been regarded as the 'experimental' or 'highbrow' year in comparison to last year's apparent collection of easy reads." The 2011 panel was militantly insistent on choosing books for which their preferred term readable was a code word for popular, unchallenging, likely to irritate the highbrows. Their publicity suggested a blow struck in defense of the ordinary bookbuyer, possibly even the beach reader. Booker judges never admit trying to correct mistakes of previous years, especially since they are all new. But it happens. When the prize goes, as it sometimes does, to an obscure or rebarbative or seemingly perverse choice, the next one often swings back toward (or beyond) the mean. John Berger's G. was followed by J. G.

Farrell's (historical) The Siege of Krishnapur, and Keri Hulme's The Bone People, a very difficult and tedious book, achieved compensation the next year in Kingsley Amis's bourgeois comedy The Old Devils. The 2012 judges even seemed chosen to smarten up what 2011 had dumbed down with a panel led by a retired spy as chair and including a member of Parliament who demanded books that "zip along." The pendulum swing may be exaggerated. Bring Up The Bodies is of course no more highbrow than Wolf Hall. The products of small publishers may testify to more rarified books that the big commercial firms wouldn't touch. And Umbrella is the closest thing in years on the Booker shortlist to the high modernism of Joyce and Woolf. Justine Jordan, in the Guardian, wrote that "as a highbrow panel dropped the previous year's demands for 'readability' in favour of complexity and the sheer pleasure of innovative [End Page 475] prose, it looked for a while as though it could have been Self's year.

As it is, perhaps Umbrella would have been too radical a choice for a prize that, as the country's biggest, cannot help but be a little conservative." If readable means popular, or likely to become popular, Hilary Mantel is one of the most readable Booker winners ever. An analysis of sales shows that Wolf Hall has sold over 600,000 copies, second only to Yann Martel's The Life of Pi (which has been in print more than three times as long). Before the Booker ceremony Bring Up the Bodies had sold more copies than all the other eleven books on the longlist combined. One book that benefited from its selection both in sales and in finding a more mainstream distribution deal is Deborah Levy's Swimming Home. Yet it is the most trifling book on the list. Entirely competent, it nevertheless lacks real significance. A short atmospheric story of middle-class English folk on holiday in a Provençal holiday home, complete with marital tensions, financial worries, and inter-couple friction (all a bit hackneyed), it energizes the plot with their discovery, in their pool, of a naked young woman.

That one of them apparently mistakes her for a bear; that the wife of a notoriously unfaithful poet invites her to stay in their house despite her implausible account of what she is doing in their pool; that she turns up naked fairly often, with little reaction from her hosts; that she is a botanist/poet who is in fact stalking the poet Joe Jacobs, wanting him to read her poem, called "Swimming Home": all these plot points are adduced in a rather affectless style. The outcome is predictably violent, though, in another way, unpredictable since its motivation is obscure. The novel comes with a pretentious introduction, written by Tom McCarthy, who made the Man Booker shortlist with his novel C in 2010, assuring the reader that Levy has read "her Lacan and Deleuze, her Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Gertrude Stein, and Ballard, not to mention Kafka and Robbe-Grillet." So that's all right then. He goes on to declare that the "setting and plot of Swimming Home are borrowed, almost ironically, from the staid English-middle-class-on-holiday novel," without clarifying what "almost irony" might be.

It is unfair to judge the novel on the basis of a paratext, but she presumably authorized it, and it would be equally wrong to admire it more just because Levy knows Continental theory. Ironic or not, Levy gives us a familiar setting and situation. Certainly unfamiliar is the donnée of Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists, which is set in Malaya and deals with the Japanese invasion of that country and the ensuing atrocities as well as the communist insurrection of the 1950s. The narrator, Yun Ling Teoh, is from a Straits Chinese family—very loyal to the British, very assimilated. At the time of the Japanese invasion she and her beloved sister were made "guests of the emperor"—that is, taken to a work camp and horribly mistreated there; and her sister is driven to death. After [End Page 476] the war Yun Ling attends university in England, comes back to Malaya, and becomes a prosecutor dedicated to the pursuit of Japanese war criminals. In 1951, having been sacked from that job, she returns to her childhood home in the highlands, where she has friends—a transplanted South African tea planter and his Chinese wife.

There she comes to know the enigmatic Aritomo, the former gardener of the emperor of Japan, now in exile. Her sister had, during a prewar visit to Tokyo, admired Japanese gardens, and Yun Ling is drawn, despite her hatred of the Japanese, to Aritomo; eventually she asks him to design a garden in honor of her sister, and he takes her on as his apprentice. Many years later, in the "present time" of the novel (about 1986), Yun Ling, now a retired judge, has come back to the garden, Yugiri, which Aritomo left to her at his death. It is decayed, and she resolves to restore it. At the same time she hosts a visiting Japanese scholar who is studying Aritomo's ukiyo-e, or woodblock prints, of which he was also a master. Yun Ling also begins to write her memoirs while she still can, since she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. This novel contains much that I enjoyed learning about, such as the principles of Japanese gardening including shakkei, the art of borrowed scenery.

Aritomo is a genuinely fascinating man who, beyond his gifts in gardening and woodblock prints, is also an archer and a tattoo artist who tattoos Yun Ling's entire torso. Nevertheless the book presents an odd mixture of longueurs and unbelievable moments of sensationalism. The descriptions of the gardening and the enigmatic but supposedly profound comments by Aritomo give way to boredom. At the same time the plot reveals that everybody is hiding secrets and that everybody is compromised, including Yun Ling, and wanders into stories of hidden treasure stolen by the Japanese and concealed in the same camp where Yun Ling and her sister were imprisoned (which she has never been able to locate) and for which her full body tattoo may be a map. Probably we are not meant to wonder how she can find her way with the help of a map tattooed on her back.

Boyd Tonkin, a usually penetrating reviewer writing in the Independent, singles out Aritomo's aphorism that "every aspect of gardening is a form of deception" and applies it to fiction, "with its incomplete points-of-view and deceptive trompe d'oeil vistas." He goes on to acclaim the novel as "suffused with a satisfying richness of colour and character" and finds it "action-packed." I agreed more with the Guardian's Kapka Kassabova, who acknowledges that "its themes are serious, its historic grounding solid, its structure careful, its old-fashioned ornamentalism respectable" but decides that the "self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader" and that the voice of the narrator lacks personality. A glimpse into another world unfamiliar to the average reader comes from Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil, a novel about the drug underworld in Bombay.

It begins with a passage whose language shows a post-Rushdie vigor: [End Page 477] Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroine of this story, and since I'm the one who's telling it and you don't know who I am, let me say that we'll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there's time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I'll have to stop, these are nighttime tales that vanish in sunlight, like vampire dust—wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my, and another for the nostrils, and a little something sweet for the mouth, and now we can begin at the beginning with the first time at Rashid's . . . The uninviting prospect that the book will be narrated by an opium pipe is, fortunately, not fulfilled.

Even the fear that three hundred pages about people drugging themselves will become boring is allayed. Narcopolis is full of degrading actions and degraded people, but its art lifts it above its environs. The narration is mostly in the hands of Dom, a young Indian man who is addicted to opium, and it circles around Rashid, the owner of an opium den; a eunuch named Dimple, who is a prostitute as well as a fixer of pipes at Rashid's; and Mr. Lee, a refugee from Mao's China who provides a link to history—not only the historic connection between India and China that fueled the opium war, but also Chinese exploration represented by an enormous junk in the Bombay harbor. There are many lesser characters as well. The city itself, defiantly called Bombay rather than Mumbai by Thayil, constitutes the most vivid character, adding this to the list of great books that embrace this fascinating city: Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Mistry's A Fine Balance, and the recent Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga.

The narrative is sometimes woozy, as when one Brahmin tells Dimple that "he knew the one thousand and one names of god and he knew the one thousand and one names of heroin and if sometimes he mixed them up, at an arti, say, if for example he said Satyam, Sharam, Sundaram—Truth is Heroin is Beauty—he knew it was allowed, because no one was listening anyway, not to him. What he wanted to know was this; who put the words in his head? How did they arrive, these sentences, so fully formed they seemed to be uttered by a divine voice?" Alongside the repetitious and circular motion of the drug-taking, there is a linear plot in which things get worse, mostly because of the introduction, where there had been opium. Another linear movement involves Dimple, who is at the center of the novel. Her self-education, which finds her quoting Baudelaire, is improbable.

But Thayil has succeeded, it seems to me, in what he intended, which was "to honour the addicted, the marginalized and people perceived to be the lowest of the low." Elsewhere he has said that the book made up for the twenty lost [End Page 478] years of his life, years lost to addiction. The literature of addiction is extensive, and reviewers have mentioned de Quincey, Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, Roberto Bolaño, and Charles Bukowski in praising this book, one of them comparing it to the "best junkie book of the last quarter century." As a first novel it is particularly impressive. Another first novel, Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, is even better. It begins with a man called Futh standing on the deck of a ferry, "holding on to the cold railings with his soft hands. The wind pummels his body through his new anorak, deranges his thinning hair and brings tears to his eyes." Futh is on his way to Germany for a weeklong walking holiday, and it steadily becomes clear that he is a hapless figure, a bewildered son, a cuckolded husband, a loser.

He is a schlemiel, a tragic nebbish. As the week goes by he gets lost; he develops terrible blisters from his stiff new boots and pains in his unexercised body; he can never seem to get his breakfast; and people take advantage of him everywhere he goes and stays. Futh is a scientist who develops artificial smells, and this novel is artfully held together with scent. Oranges recur, often reminding him of his mother, who left when he was twelve. The smell of cigarettes is a persistent feature of his marriage; when his wife comes in smelling of cigarette smoke he tries to believe she is a secret smoker, despite her denials, rather than acknowledging that his lifelong nemesis, his neighbor Kenny, is the smoker of whom she smells. He returns often to a memory of his family together on a cliff in Cornwall. As his father droned boringly about a lighthouse, his mother finally said, "Do you know how much you bore me?" There was a pause and then his father quietly packed away the picnic. Snapping shut the cool-box lid, he stood and looked at his wife.

Futh watched the gulls fighting over the remains of their lunch, and then he looked down at his hand and saw the glass vial broken in his palm, the fleshy pad beneath his thumb cut open. The volatile contents of the lighthouse soaked into his wound, stinging, and ran between his fingers, soaking his boots, and the scent of it rose from like millions of tiny balloons escaping towards the sky. For a long time afterwards, he would lift the palm of his hand to his nose, searching for that scent of violets. The lighthouse mentioned here is a silver-plated antique container for perfume, acquired as an heirloom from his father's family. Later some of his relatives will demand it back; he keeps it, though, as a sort of talisman, carrying it with him on his German walking tour until a depraved hotel manageress steals it from his room. Novels in which everything goes wrong (and there is much more, including [End Page 479] Futh's bed-wetting) can become tiresome, but The Lighthouse never does, which is a tribute to Moore's delicacy.

Futh is an innocent, a man too helpless to cope, surrounded by people more nearly ruthless than he is—his wife, his father and mother, Kenny, Bernard, and Ester at his hotel in the suggestive town of Hellhaus. There is one person who shows him kindness: a man he meets on the ferry named Carl, who said to him, "Do you ever get a bad feeling about something? A bad feeling about something that's going to happen?" Carl looks in vain for Futh on the return trip but then goes on his way. Will Self, author of Umbrella, which many observers considered at least the joint favorite to take the Booker, is a well-established author, with twenty books to his credit. He is also a controversial figure, described by one reviewer as "author, journalist, psycho-geographer, wisecracking television show panelist"—as well as reformed alcoholic and heroin addict who publicly cleaned himself up as the new century began. Self is not modest.

He has explained, more than once, what he was trying to do with Umbrella, saying that he "wanted to capture the real-time experience of being alive and, in doing so, expose the failings of narrative fiction." Writing in the Guardian he said that he wants to dispense with convention entirely and make his books "the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire." Of course no writer can escape convention, though Self gets along without paragraph breaks or punctuation marking direct quotations. But readers who know Ulysses will not find Umbrella unprecedentedly uncorseted. The reviewer Maggie Shipstead writes: "While I enjoyed puzzling over the novel's tangled references and images, the rewards of deciphering these patterns had more to do with literary gamesmanship than approaching a truer representation of consciousness"; and another reviewer referred to the "thesaurus-gorged sentences that inflame his detractors." Self may be, as the British say, too clever by half. There is a lingering suspicion even today of modernist excess—what Kingsley Amis called "obtruded oddity." And yet Joyce wasn't self-effacing, either, and Umbrella is something of a heroic undertaking.

Like The Garden of Evening Mists it moves between three major times, in this case, 2010, when the psychiatrist Zack Busner revisits the mental hospital where he once practiced, now closed down; 1971, when he began work there, he diagnosed some apparently catatonic patients as suffering from encephalitis lethargica and treated them with L-Dopa; and 1918, when the most important of these patients, Audrey De-Ath (otherwise Death, otherwise Dearth) fell ill in the epidemic that swept Europe after the Great War and entered into a half century of living death. Unlike Tan's novel, the time shifts are not signaled, being contained within interior monologues. A typical passage reads like this: [End Page 480] Torticollis comes to Busner uselessly—and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair aerated cream in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them— . . . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she'll 'preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman . . .

See, 'e cummup 'ere mos days . . . —before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. —Electric woman waits for you and me . . . with Nescafe and a marijuana cigarette burning rubber after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm . . . Busner had taken the wrinkled fang trailing venom, his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase . . . nauseating. Her boyfriend's hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. Torticollis is a twisted neck, and Ronnie (i.e. R. D. Laing) was the radical psychiatrist who led the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.

Busner's association with him makes him an object of suspicion when he proposes L-Dopa to treat his "enkies." (This part of the story is indebted to Awakenings [1973], by Oliver Sacks.) The interior monologue follows some rules, of course, being moved in response to external events (the nurses that avoid Busner and Audrey) and mental associations (Jimi Hendrix lyrics, Sartre and nausea). There is enough solid "actual" or "external" plot to support this long and complex book, including Busner's marital problems and changes in the National Health System. But the most interesting part of it is the Edwardian life of Audrey De-Ath, with her colorful cockney father, her two contrasting brothers (one of whom goes on to become a government minister, while the other is killed on the Western Front), her sexual awakening (which is shortly followed by her long, long sleep), and her political activities. She is a campaigner for women's suffrage. During the war she is a munitionette.

In her encephalitic coma, she continues to make the repetitive arm movements of operating munitions machinery, which shows Busner that she still has some life, and leads to his theory that movement is necessary for memory. Before the war she had been secretary to an umbrella manufacturer, which is one of the slight connections to the book's title. This is an engaging story, and Maggie Shipstead writes, in fact, that "taken as a repudiation of narrative . . . Umbrella fails by virtue of its own success as a narrative." The Guardian reviewer linked Self to the ongoing argument about popular and literary fiction, pointing out that the longlist which included Umbrella "is widely seen as a deliberate correction to the controversial plea from last year's judges for 'readability,' and some may conclude that Self's book represents the opposite quality. But, though hard work is certainly demanded from the reader, it is always rewarded." It is the best [End Page 481] possible dismissal of the notion that literary novels are bought but not read, the requirement that fiction must zip along. And so to Hilary Mantel.

Her Wolf Hall was a richly deserving winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009 (see "Margins of Fact and Fiction," SR, summer 2010). Bring Up the Bodies can only be described as more of the same, and it is hard to argue that more of the same is, again, better than its competitors and thus deserves the award (I worry about pressure on the judges when the final installment, apparently to be called The Mirror and the Light, becomes eligible). Again her book focuses on Thomas Cromwell, the versatile, resolute, crafty commoner who, having begun in the service of Cardinal Wolsey, becomes the indispensable agent of Henry viii. In her characterization Mantel's innovation is to make Cromwell not exactly a hero, but a central character who attracts sympathy and admiration despite his ruthlessness. The usual narrative of the Tudor court makes Cromwell a monster—and Thomas More, well, saintly. Mantel has no use for More, crisply dismissing him in the first volume and having Cromwell clearly dominate him conversationally and intellectually. That novel ends with More's death and the movement of Anne Boleyn toward the throne.

It ends, too, with a troubling hint in the revelation that Wolf Hall, previously unidentified, is the family home of the Seymour family—that is, of Jane Seymour, who would follow Anne in Henry's bed. Bring Up the Bodies is mostly about Henry's growing dissatisfaction with Anne and Cromwell's role in composing her death. Martin Rubin, in the Los Angeles Times, writes that this book is "more than the equal of its predecessor when it comes to intensity and drama, its portrait of Cromwell ever more evocative and nuanced as he disposes of a queen, more elevated than a mere cardinal (Wolsey) and saint (Thomas More), whose downfalls were front and center in 'Wolf Hall.'" Most significant is our realization of how Cromwell's efficiency, his capacity to make things happen, is a function of a hard unscrupulous cruelty despite his engaging qualities. One of Cromwell's tasks is to produce the evidence that will justify dispensing with Anne. For Cromwell this also provides him with an opportunity to revenge himself on those who have displeased him, in particular four young nobles who mocked Cardinal Wolsey in a pantomime. He succeeds in incriminating all of them as lovers of the queen.

His procedure is urbane and inexorable, and he is good at subtle threats. Here he is assembling evidence for his claim that Anne committed incest with her brother: "Now she is not queen," Bryan says, "because she is not, is she . . . I can call her what she is, a hot minx, and where has she better opportunity, than with her family?" [End Page 482] He says, "By that reasoning, do you think she goes to it with Uncle Norfolk? It could even be you, Sir Francis. If she has a mind to her relatives. You are a great gallant." "Oh, Christ," Bryan says. "Cromwell, you would not." "I only mention it." And here is Cromwell after questioning Mark Smeaton, a musician who proclaims that the queen loves him, telling him that the council will want a full confession. "Smeaton, what is your secret?" they will demand. You will blush and say, ah, gentlemen, I cannot impart. But you will impart all, Mark, for they will make you. And you will do it freely, or do it enforced.

He turns away from the boy, as Mark's face falls open in dismay, as his body begins to shake: five rash minutes of boasting, in one ungratified life and, like nervous tradesmen, the gods at once send in their account. Mark has lived in a story of his own devising, where the beautiful princess in her tower hears beyond her casement music of unearthly sweetness. She looks out and sees by moonlight the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well. The doors open and ordinary faces crowd in, the surface of the dream is shattered: you are in Stepney on a warm night at the beginning of spring, the last birdsong is fading into the hush of twilight, somewhere a bolt rattles, a stool is scraped across the floor, a dog barks below the window and Thomas Cromwell says to you, "We all want our supper, let's get on, here is the paper and the ink.

Here is Master Wriothesley, he will write for us." The present-tense verbs, the sensory details, and the fluid personal pronouns are all part of the flexible and beautiful style Mantel has invented for her Tudor story. That her protagonist employs Machiavellian tactics to advance an immoral project for an unworthy king, without forfeiting the interest and even the grudging admiration of a reader, testifies to her mastery. [End Page 483]

Question: Who wrote the 2012 Man Booker prizewinning novel Bring Up the Bodies?
Answer: Hilary Mantel