![]() ![]() “It was astonishing, because it was the reason I’d been making the pictures expressed so clearly, and in a completely different form.”įor Ben Miles, with whom Mantel co-adapted The Mirror and the Light for its run last year at the Gielgud theatre in London, the project was part of a continuing collaboration of nearly a decade’s standing. George Miles remembers a huge email arriving from Mantel. It was more than a supplement, it was something really essential that I needed to do,” she says. And, for me, it was just the refreshment I needed. “But I had no idea what, at the time, or that it would be such an odyssey, marching on at the same time as the books.”.Īt that stage, with The Mirror and the Light, the third in her trilogy, still several years from completion, “there was a long, long way to go. “I remember saying, ‘we have to do something with these’, Mantel says. George Miles sent her a dummy book after he had collected a critical mass of photographs. She also published, in 2014, a collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.īut among Mantel’s many remarkable attributes is her desire for constant reinvigoration. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have been the only consecutive novels by a writer to have both won the Booker prize, and Mantel was closely involved in their transition to stages in Stratford, London and New York, also seeing them adapted for BBC television. ![]() ![]() She has become a byword for a particular kind of intensely-felt, brilliantly subtle exploration of the past. Mantel is preparing to leave Devon to set up home with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month, having previously expressed her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. The result is a collection of ambiguous, disquieting images in which the present rubs up against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, thrillingly for Mantel fans, have never before been released.Īmong other things, it is an interrogation of the way we interact with history of the gaps in the record its elusive nature and its unexpected resonances with our contemporary lives. ![]() The previous year, their mother had died, and they started out at their grandmother’s flat in Surbiton, in south-west London not far from Cromwell’s childhood home, aiming to get to the Tower of London, on foot and by boat, in a single day. The book’s origins, the three of them explain, lie in a walk Ben and George took shortly after Ben had been cast as Cromwell in the summer of 2013, and combined his desire to construct a mental notebook of significant sites in his character’s life with a revisiting of places central to the brothers’ family history. Hilary Mantel with Ben Miles (centre), an actor, and his brother, George, a photographer, with whom she collaborated to create The Wolf Hall Picture Book. We are meeting to discuss The Wolf Hall Picture Book, on which she has collaborated with the actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the stage versions of her Wolf Hall trilogy, and his brother, the photographer George Miles. #Wolf drawing series#“I am, as I think a lot of authors are, concerned about the speed at which we are consuming history now, the way that the past, the very recent past, is being made into a version and real-life people walking around have to live with their representatives and so on,” she says, not naming names, but nodding when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s imminent appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. Today, Mantel says she is alive to the danger of drawing shallow links with present-day politics and society. Many people wilfully misread her criticism of what she explained as “the way we maltreat royal persons, making them one superhuman, and yet less than human”. She made headlines a year ago, when she suggested the monarchy could be facing “the endgame”, and may not “outlast William” and a lecture she gave in 2013, entitled Royal Bodies, in which she described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess”, caused an outcry. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |