Reading Hilary Mantel

Reading Hilary Mantel is a meticulously researched, original, and beautifully written monograph. Lucy Arnold’s sustained care and caution not to limit the potentiality of the ambiguities that lace Hilary Mantel’s writing are perfectly supported by her sensitive and nuanced engagement with the thinking of pertinent critical theorists, such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière. Overall, the study succeeds in its intention, which is stated at the end of the introduction: “It is in this space, between entrapment and escape, that this book locates itself, seeking not to capture and constrain the meaning within Mantel’s canon but to trace instead its spectral lines of flight” (12). The first chapter subtly examines the complex place and places of the spectral in Mantel’s extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003). And it is here that Arnold’s discreet yet highly skillful discursive allusions to Derrida’s work, in particular (also explored explicitly as explained), really begin to come to the fore through a distinct preference for multivalent terms, such as secret, supplement, and “partial occlusion” (21). These deliberate choices mean that the project of the study is crucially supported from the top level of intellectual and complex theoretics right down to the nuts and bolts of diction. And, notably, this project primarily concerns a thorough examination of ghosts and spectrality through “a particular mode of reading capable of privileging the secrecy and ambiguity in Mantel’s work as a whole” (42, my italics)

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