“I’m against parallels, you know, and people always try to force me to do them,” he says firmly. It is Mantel’s ear for the interplay of past and present that makes her trilogy a landmark of early 21st-century fiction, though she is unsurprisingly reserved. He hit the headlines a year ago when he suggested the monarchy could be facing “the end of the game” and that he might not “get over William”. and a lecture he gave in 2013, entitled Royal Bodies, in which he described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a “plastic princess”, caused an outcry. Many people willfully misinterpreted her criticism of what she described as “the way we mistreat royalty, making them superhuman but less than human.” Today, Mantel says she is alive to the danger of making shallow connections with today’s politics and society. “I’m worried, as I think a lot of writers are, about the speed at which we’re consuming history now, about the way the past, the very recent past, becomes a version and the real-life people walking around have to live with the representatives them and so on,” he says, without naming names, but nods when I mention the TV series The Crown and Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming appearance as Boris Johnson in This England. We meet to discuss the Wolf Hall Picture Book, on which he has collaborated with actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the stage versions of the Wolf Hall trilogy, and his brother, photographer George Miles. 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. Photo: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian The origins of the book, the three explain, lie in a walk Ben and George took shortly after playing Cromwell in the summer of 2013 and combined his desire to make a mental notebook of important locations in his character’s life with a visits to places central to the brothers’ family history. The previous year, their mother had died, and they set out from their grandmother’s flat in Surbiton, south-west London, not far from Cromwell’s childhood home, aiming to reach the Tower of London, on foot and by boat, with only one day. The result is a collection of ambiguous, unsettling images in which the present rubs against the past, accompanied by excerpts from the novels, some taken from deleted scenes that, excitingly for Mantel fans, have never been released before. Among other things, it is an interrogation of how we interact with history. of gaps in the record; its fleeting nature; and its unexpected resonance with our modern lives. Mantel is set to leave Devon to settle with her husband, Gerald McEwen, in Ireland this month after previously expressing her shame at the British government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and her desire to become an Irish citizen. It has become a byword for a certain kind of intense, ultra-subtle exploration of the past. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were the author’s only consecutive novels to both win 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. He also published, in 2014, a collection of short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. But among Mantel’s many notable characteristics is her desire for constant rejuvenation. George Miles sent her a virtual book after he had amassed a critical mass of photographs. “I remember saying, ‘we’ve got to do something with these,’” Mantel says. “But I had no idea what, at the time, or that it would be such an odyssey, going along with the books.” At that stage, with The Mirror and the Light, the third in her trilogy, several years away from completion, “there was a long way to go. And, for me, it was just the refreshment I needed. It was more than just a supplement, it was something very important for me to do,” he says. George Miles remembers a huge email he received from Mandel. “It was amazing, because it was the reason I made the images express themselves so clearly and in a completely different form.” For Ben Miles, with whom Mantel adapted The Mirror and the Light for performance last year at London’s Gielgud Theatre, the play was part of an ongoing collaboration spanning almost a decade. The three of them started visiting places together, one of them often acting as a decoy for the assistant guides in order to show them the official version. George Miles describes a photograph taken by his brother at Hampton Court, showing Mandel holding a sword in the middle of a sword fight as Ben sneaks off to take a picture of Anne Boleyn’s room. “When you got to a place with your camera,” Ben recalls, “you often felt like you were on a route around the place that was obviously not the designated route by the groundskeeper. And often it was a kind of long winding digression. You never knew what you were looking for.” Some incredibly striking and evocative images followed: a ghost hound in Richmond Park, which brought to mind Cromwell’s memories of dogs circling, smelling burnt flesh; Boleyn’s robes, spread out on a table like a shroud at Lambeth Palace. a curling iron lying on the floor during filming at Cromwell’s mansion in the City of London, Austin Friars, looking for all the world like an instrument of torture. There it is again – the interplay between past and present. But the book is not an attempt on Mantel’s part to draw parallels with modern life. She was, she says, persistently confused when people suggested, for example, that Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings looked like Cromwell. “I would think: no, no way. “I just think because I value the long view so much. And that’s why I won’t draw the parallels. I think if you do that it turns real people into these kind of fictional figures and unfortunately they’re not. They are real, present and dangerous.”
The Wolf Hall Picture Book by Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles & George Miles (HarperCollins, £20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
