posted on 25 May 2023

Fludd by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, who died late last year, seems destined to be remembered and feted for her historical novels – especially the Tudor-period Thomas Cromwell trilogy of Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. Prior to that she had also written a hugely admired novel set in the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. These are indeed monumental achievements and garnered the author plenty of literary awards – including two Bookers – but they are by no means fully representative of her total output. I discovered Mantel through her quirky, often darkly humorous novels such as The Giant O’Brien, Beyond Black and the short story collection, Learning to Talk and I still prefer these earlier works over the historical panorama she creates in the Cromwell sequence.

Fludd was published in 1989 and was her fourth novel. It most certainly deserves the label ‘darkly humorous’ and is close to being an allegorical fable dealing with religion, the battle of good and evil and the exercise of free will.

Set in the fictional northern town of Fetherhoughton in the mid-1950s, the setting amid the moors evokes a misty grey dead-end English village which has become a place of despair – especially for the Roman Catholic priest who has lost his faith and a small group of nuns presided over by the monstrous Mother Perpetua. Father Angwin is finding himself under pressure from his Bishop who is intent on reforming the priest’s behaviour and is living in anticipation that a new curate will be sent to do the bishop’s bidding.

Father Angwin has become convinced that the local tobacconist is some kind of incarnation of the Devil but has also become a kind of mentor/confessor to one of the nuns – Sister Philomena – who has been banished to Fetherhoughton from a convent in Ireland because her sister Kathleen had broken their rules.

Then one evening a rain-soaked stranger arrives calling himself Fludd and is assumed to be the curate they had all been expecting. But is he? Everyone he comes into contact with is, in some way, transformed by the experience. Angwin begins to get back his hope and equanimity, the sour and nosey housekeeper, Agnes, is swept off her feet by Fludd’s charm and Sister Philomena finds herself magnetically attracted to Fludd and his philosophy of freedom. The only person seemingly resistant to the message of transformation is Sister Perpetua who retains her steely demeanour and stands in some kind of opposition to this stranger’s blandishments. This, it transpires, is the frontline in the battle between good and evil.

I was immediately reminded of T.F. Powys’ Mr Weston’s Good Wine which I have reviewed on this site (here) and which, in approach and its key themes, treads on similar ground. Powys’ book must have been a conscious or sub-conscious influence on Mantel both in terms of content and form. Not that I see this as a criticism because Mantel certainly adds a new depth to the allegory of the eternal battle between good and evil and, provocatively, asks us to consider which is which.

The book had good reviews when it was released but didn’t break through in terms of her profile with readers in quite the way her next book, A Place of Greater Safety, was destined to do. Patricia O’Connor reviewing the book for The New York Times says that “..the writing is characteristically Mantel: mordant, pitiless, razor-sharp” and Publishers Weekly concluded that:

“Hawthornden Prize-winner Mantel (The Giant, O'Brien) uses her knack for dry wit and lovely, scene-setting detail to liven up crisp, utilitarian prose, revealing, as her characters do, the ever-surprising divine in the mundane.”

I’d encourage readers to explore Mantel’s non-historical novels because there’s a danger the giant shadow cast by the likes of Wolf Hall will hide the treasures to be found there.

Inexpensive paperbacks of the book are easy to find but the original hardback is increasingly elusive and expensive.

 

Terry Potter

May 2023