The provinces too are largely absent, featuring essentially as places where the characters grow up, where they are damaged in some way and where (with the exception of Danton, whose hankering for a return to Arcis-sur-Aube is a foolish chimera) they wish never to return. Apart from a few mob-like instantiations, the Parisian masses have no place in A Place of Greater Safety. This is unsurprising in a way: unless one happens to be Leon Tolstoy, the novel form lends itself poorly to big picture description and analysis. Her A Place of Greater Safety obliges us to question some of the fundamental ways that we have approached the Revolution, and in particular the Terror, and manages to do this in imaginative ways not available to historians (and all the more inspiring for that).Ī Place of Greater Safety eschews panoramic description, ex cathedra historical judgements, and the wide-angle lens on revolutionary process. But she clearly revels in historical research, luxuriates in historical detail and thrills to the cocktail of power and violence that accompany revolutions. Mantel is a novelist who sometimes writes on historical subjects – she has authored twice as many contemporary novels (eight) as historical ones. When I first read this huge novel, I was stunned and agog: stunned at the novelistic power of the narrative, the deftness of its emplotment and the sharpness of the writing and agog (in that snooty way we historians can affect) at the thoroughness of its historical grounding. Mantel follows them from their childhood, fast-forwarding through their adolescence, to the experience of Revolution of 1789 and the climacteric spring of 1794. The latter novel is structured around the interlocking lives of Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins. Wolf Hall ends with “the sickening sound of the axe on flesh,” as Sir Thomas More encounters the block, and this eerily echoes the bravura description of the guillotining of Danton at the end of A Place of Greater Safety.

Her A Place of Greater Safety (1992) is the most compelling historical novel devoted to the French Revolution that I have been fortunate enough to encounter.

Mantel enthusiasts should try her back catalogue. The plaudits for Hilary Mantel are already starting to appear, as the second volume of her trilogy based on the life of Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, is launched this month in England.The first, Wolf Hall, enjoyed huge success, winning in 2009 Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the Man Booker. Colin Jones Queen Mary, University of London

Mantel a place of greater safety