Lose yourselves in this utterly engrossing essay by Hilary Mantel, currently free to read at the London Review of Books. Entitled Royal Bodies, it considers the construct of this utterly peculiar institution, it’s basest aspects and its most unworldly character, in Mantel’s typically direct, painterly, and slightly off kilter way — In looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half-reveal itself… Royal persons are both gods and beasts.
Mantel wrote the incomparable historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, two thirds of a trilogy centered around Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the founding of the Anglican Church. So skewed and revelatory is her lens, and so brilliantly constructed is her authorial voice that I waited for the release of the second book with an anticipation usually reserved for a new record by a beloved band — as much as I wanted to hear the story continue, it was the style of the writing, the sound of her language that I couldn’t wait to submerge in…
The essay caused, and is still causing, a retarded kurfuffle in the UK for her gimlet eyed assessment of Kate Middleton. Umbrage, in this case, relies on classic non-reading or a stubborn non-comprehension of the essay’s essential humanism. Read on here…