BookJack tells us about the debut novel by Booker winner Hilary Mantel, "A Place of Greater Safety", published in 1992. The protagonists - the heroes of the French Revolution Georges Danton, Camille Demulain and Maximilien Robespierre. Interweaving their stories and without falling into excessive admiration, the author paints a portrait of the era.
Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, and Vacant Possession. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times,The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England with her husband.
Englishwoman Hilary Mantel's real international fame came in the 21st century with her historical trilogy about Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall, Bring Out the Bodies and Mirror and Light (the first two novels were awarded the Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively), but her debut was much earlier - in the mid-1980s, when her first books were published. "Heart of the Storm was published in 1992, but Mantel started working on this novel even earlier, in the late 1970s, which is why, according to the writer herself, her literary career should be counted from it.
In the early 1990s, when the post-modern ruled the show on the world cultural scene, The Heart of the Storm was greeted with reserve: critics, while recognizing the undeniable talent of Hilary Mantel, at the same time not without irony remarked that her book would benefit greatly if it was "a little less historical and a little more of a novel. However, as is often the case with things that don't fall into current fashion, Heart of the Storm proved to be a novel with a long breath. Today, this conservative, thorough, and utterly devoid of playful irony account of the three heroes of the French Revolution - Georges Danton, Camille Demoulin and Maximilien Robespierre - looks much more modern and worthy of many postmodern opuses of those years.
People of the older generation will probably remember the once acclaimed book "The Gospel of Robespierre" by the Sixties writer Anatoly Gladilin, which was published in the famous series "Fiery Revolutionaries" and describes with documentary precision - sympathetically, but without idealizing - the life of the incorruptible (a nickname given to the hero by his contemporaries) from his early childhood until his death by guillotine. Hilary Mantel does something similar with her characters: weaving three stories into one, she eschews seductive parallels to later eras, does not modernize the characters and motivations and generally follows the historical canvas of events rather strictly. But in the dry and, in general, many familiar factual material, she manages to breathe soul and not charmed by his characters (none of the great trio does not look in her description of such a pretty boy), at the same time clearly falls in love with them himself - and in love with the reader. A flat picture from a history book under Mantel's magic pen gains volume, filled with color, sound, and genuine passion.
Stubborn, in his own way honest, charismatic and boisterous big man Danton, a man with a disfigured face and tremendous energy. Camille Demoulins, the fragile, nervous, cocky, always vacillating between frenzied integrity and the most unbridled vice, who is simultaneously in love with his wife, the beautiful Lucille, and her mother, the statuesque Annette Duplessis. The quiet, attentive, dim, obsessed with the thirst for justice, Robespierre, completely devoid of vices except one - exorbitant greed. Mantel meets each of them literally in the cradle (Demulain aroused horror and admiration in his father, a dull provincial lawyer; Robespierre was conceived out of wedlock and lost his mother early; Danton was trampled by an angry bull and almost died as a child) and accompanies them to the moment when, in April 1794, the third sent the first two to the scaffold, only to follow them himself three months later.
Their acquaintance and friendship (Demoulin and Robespierre, as talented provincialists, studied together at Louis Saint College in the capital; Demoulin and Danton became friends in their youth, while practicing law; Danton and Robespierre became close associates in the early stages of the revolution), and afterwards their discord, rivalry and enmity become the plot leitmotif of the novel. Around him Mantel constructs a vast array of secondary characters and historical events, drawing with a firm hand a map of the French Revolution on a scale both human and global.
As mentioned above, while unconditionally fond of her characters, Mantel does not glamorize them, romanticize them, or vindicate them: at no point does her gaze, compassionate and understanding, lose its penetrating sharpness. The writer's task is not to justify or, on the contrary, to blame Danton, Demoulin and Robespierre; her goal is both loftier and simpler.
In three linked destinies, in three different stories, she sees three human and social types brought to life by the tumultuous time of revolution and which ultimately defined it. By constructing a profound, almost mystical connection between the era and the man who was destined to shine and perish in that era, Mantel thus reveals something new, strange, and - for all the familiarity of the source material - completely unobvious in the history of great historical upheavals.
This article was sponsored by Galina Kovaleva
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