31 min listen
It's the first few days of a national lockdown, so have humans been hubristic in not expecting something like this to happen (1:10)? Over in France, is President Macron dealing with this any better (11:05)? Last, is there any point in being a historical novelist in the age of Hilary Mantel (19:10)?
When the judges for the 1992 Booker Prize received Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, an 800-page novel set during the French Revolution seemed a quirky diversion from the work of a novelist then most associated with shortish dark comedies of contemporary or recent life, such as Fludd (1989), featuring a weird Catholic priest, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), in which an Englishwoman suffers Saudi Arabian culture shock. We did not shortlist the book. History shows that monumental distant-historical fiction would subsequently become the glorious core of Mantel’s work, though, perhaps validating our doubts, featuring English, rather than French, revolutionary struggles.
