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‘Incisive and poetic, sensual and intelligent, a book with great breadth, heart and courage.’ ALI SMITH.

‘One of the most intense and disturbing works of fiction I’ve read in many years.’ PANKAJ MISHRA.

A top pick for 2010, Open Book, Radio 4.

Picked by The Independent’s Talent 2010 issue.

A Life Apart tells two stories. The first is of Ritwik’s; a story of a young man’s escape from a blighted childhood of squalor and abuse in Calcutta to the edge of what he considers to be a new world, full of possibilities, in England, where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past, especially the scarred, all-consuming relationship with his mother, is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for?

Could it arrive in the form of the second story that comprises the novel, the one he is writing himself, the story of an Englishwoman in the old world of Bengal on the eve of India’s first partition? Or could it be in the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, fragile and damaged, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange of the care that she needs? And then one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik meets the suave, unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.

Set in India during the 1970s and ’80s, in England in the ’90s and in Raj Bengal in the 1900s, this award-winning first novel from one of India’s most acclaimed new writers is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling. Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut marks a new turning point in writing from and of the Subcontinent.

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The Cost of Living is an unexpected gift. Collected between its covers are twenty short stories, spanning twenty years, from 1951 to 1971 – the first one, ‘Madeline’s Birthday’, was the second story she submitted to The New Yorker (and her first to be published there) and the final story, ‘The Burgundy Weekend’, has never appeared in a book before. Reading The Cost of Living gives one a diagrammatic miniature of the trajectory of Gallant’s development: from the remarkably assured and tonally perfect first story, about five people brought together on a Connecticut country home but each locked in his or her subjectivity, untouched by, even hostile to, the others’ worlds, to the long final story, what we have here is a work-by-work instance of a major artist’s unfurling into magnificent efflorescence.

But The Cost of Living reminds one of what Schumann wrote about the young Brahms, that he was born fully formed, like Minerva from the head of Zeus. The stories from the fifties are like little gems: perfectly cut and glittering, whichever way you turn them. ‘The Picnic’, set in post-war France – a lot of her stories are set in France; Paris has been her adoptive hometown for over sixty years now – explores the recurring theme of incompatible, inimical worlds, this time the players being American army families garrisoned in a small town, Virolun, versus the headstrong, arrogant local grande dame, Madame Pégurin. This theme of the innocence of the New World confronting the opaque convolutions and secrecies of the Old, one that Henry James made so much his own, is a rich seam in Gallant’s work too. It surfaces in ‘A Day Like Any Other’, where two American children are left in the daily care of the Austrian Frau Stengel, a not-so-closet admirer of Hitler, and again in ‘Autumn Day’, about a marriage that fails to take off from the very beginning, where the young American army wife’s alienation and misery finds the perfect ‘objective correlative’ in the post-war Salzburg setting. In all these stories, there is some hostility, either perceived or objectively true, simmering away under the surface and Gallant’s rootless, alienated characters are electrically alive to it, to their sense of not belonging. In ‘Bernadette’, one of the finest stories from this period, Gallant gives this unbelonging to the eponymous maid, an illiterate, god-fearing, superstitious creature from one of the most remote outposts of Quebec, almost animal in her implied slyness and sensuality, who finds herself baffled by the ultra-liberal, modern couple she works for. Anatomies of disintegrating, toxic marriages are hardly new but Gallant brings to the marriage of Nora and Robbie Knight a forensic precision, demolishing liberal hypocrisy and inconsistencies with measured savagery.

And then something crucial and radical happens to her stories from the beginning of the sixties. Gallant’s style, always lapidary and luminous, becomes elliptical, the stories become involuted, and she begins to leave out more and more information, concentrating on interiority and the movements of thoughts. She becomes more daring about shifting between points of view and her characters’ consciousness, sometimes within a single paragraph, and the risk pays off uncountable times over. The sentences pack in more and more while remaining pellucid but, at the same time, suggestive, elusive, tight with a dozen emotional possibilities. W.G. Sebald once complained about the ‘credibility problem’ that fiction poses: he simply did not believe in the causal connection of sentences, the clunkiness in the space between two sentences. I think he would have admired deeply the way Gallant has torn up the unwritten rulebook about this particular convention, replacing it with an imaginative and artistic logic that speaks a deeper emotional truth. Her imagination becomes unpredictable and left-field and she moves from an extraordinary writer to a truly great artist. One of the effects she achieves is to make the stories unsettling like dreams, fluid and strange.

The two longest stories in the book, ‘The Cost of Living’ (1962) and ‘The Burgundy Weekend’ (1971), are some of the finest example of this compressed, dense clarity. The title story, narrated by one of two Australian sisters, who live in a shabby hotel in Paris and form a very unconventional quartet with two younger French residents, both struggling actors, one woman and one man, explores the skittering dynamics of power, torqued by obligation, generosity, and sexual desire. Goodness, in this story, becomes a terrible yet unwitting weapon and I cannot think of a more powerful story on the way the material impinges on the emotional. ‘The Burgundy Weekend’ once again pits New World against the Old; this time it’s a Quebecois couple travelling in France. Lucie, a trained nurse, is more than wife to the withdrawn, autistic Jérôme, and as they are driven to Burgundy from Paris by Gilles, a monstrously egocentric cousin, Jérôme’s past visit to his hostess in Burgundy, Henriette Arrieu, emerges in counterpoint to the present. In forty pages it says more about marriage, memory, regret and being a foreigner than tomes on each of those subjects yet remains resiliently, gloriously ungiving with its central core. You need to return to them over and over, as if to great poetry, in order to make them yield their meanings.

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The second is Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar, £12.99). This is not a graphic novel in the strictest sense, rather, an exuberantly illustrated collection of fourteen short stories written by the artist himself. Circling around the theme of journey, this book, about transformation, is itself a transformative reading and visual experience. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have fallen into disuse, become brightly coloured garden installations that house tropical birds. An exchange student is a two-dimensional collection of lines with a leaf for a head. A blind reindeer appears on the roofs of houses on Christmas night to collect objects precious to people’s hearts. A lost deep-sea diver brings about an inexplicable change of heart in the irascible local witch. Fragments of paper, containing private, unpublished poetry, begin to come together as a huge ball, which then becomes a giant cloud over a town and releases itself as paper-rain, bringing a wholly unexpected discovery to each of the townspeople in the morning: scraps of paper containing ‘various faded words pressed into accidental verse’. And to each reader, they ‘whisper something different’, touching his life with a ‘strange feeling of weightlessness’. There’s even one story which executes pastiches of Italian Renaissance paintings. Tan’s writing is as beautiful as his art and his mind produces ideas and images as if from an inexhaustible sea of magic. This is one of the most wondrous books to be published in recent times.

The final one is Harvey Pekar’s adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Studs Terkel’s astonishing compendium of ordinary lives, Working (The New Press, $22.95), a monument of American oral history, first published in 1974. The world’s biggest economy may well be one of the most unequal, high capitalism and redistribution being as immiscible as oil and water, and here is an eye-opening account of the have-nots in the richest country, of gravediggers, stonecutters, garbagemen, bar pianists, barbers, proofreaders, mail carriers, supermarket box-boys, hookers, miners. Reading these first-person accounts of how they make a living, I was reminded repeatedly of the Old Testament words, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ A fleet of illustrators has been gathered to do the artwork; each is distinctive and honours the person/profession it illustrates. Heartbreaking, revelatory, impassioned, and sometimes shockingly frank, it contains a dignity that borders on the noble and is a work of focused moral energy.

Dignity is also a word that comes to mind when faced with Jason’s expressionless characters. Low Moon (Fantagraphics, $24.99), his latest, a collection of five stories, is a book that can easily be counted as one of his finest. ‘Emily Says Hello’ is a devastating story of the mismatch of two different types of desires – sexual and vengeful. The title-story is a deadpan take on the Western, complicated by chess, revenge, and, once again, love. ‘&’ brings together, wittily, punningly, two separate, melancholy tales right at the end. The final story, ‘You Are Here’, is a heartbreaking one of love and loss but, unsurprisingly for a Jason book, involves alien abduction, space travel, and a desolate sting in the tail. Laconic, sad, resonantly eloquent without the use of words, Jason’s work continues to mine the depths of the heart in the way Keaton or Chaplin did.

Deadpan too is Joe Daly’s hilarious and far-out, stoner-cool graphic novel, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (Fantagraphics, $22.99). There are two stories, both featuring two dope-smoking, hippy losers, the monkey-footed graphic artist, Dave, and his didgeridoo-maker friend, Paul. The first, ‘The Leaking Cello Case’, has the duo exposing dodgy drug-dealing in Cape Town while the second, longer piece, ‘John Wesley Harding’ (yes, named after the 1967 Bob Dylan album), finds the two of them in a wetlands nature reserve, looking for an escaped capybara (named John Wesley Harding). Soon they stumble upon a top-secret, dangerous plot to drain the wetlands so that it can be sold off as real estate and it is up to Dave and Paul to foil the evil-doers. But are they sure they’re not imagining it? Twist follows twist in this insanely funny caper and the comic tone is pitch-perfect throughout. The drawing is pin-sharp, the textures sumptuous and the writing uproarious and spot-on. Double happiness indeed.

While we’re on the topic of pin-sharp drawing, how could I not mention Paul Hornschemeier’s All and Sundry (Fantagraphics, $29.99)? You know you’ve arrived when your bottom-drawer doodles are published in a swish hardcover edition, except this assorted stuff from flat file drawers is a visual feast. Short graphic stories, short non-graphic (but illustrated) stories, serialised strips (from Life and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, for example), anthologised pieces, original artwork, posters, covers from the non-English editions of his books: which reader won’t feel grateful for this gorgeous opulence? An endlessly browsable book, designed to be dipped into and savoured in short sessions, it will put a blissful smile on your face before you turn the lights out for bedtime.

A different kind of smile, nostalgic, melancholy, affection-filled, will break out on your face while reading Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ’N’ Roll Life (Fantagraphics, $19.99), the memoir by Bruce Paley, illustrated by Carol Swain. A series of intimate snapshots of a lost era, the book gives us a front-seat view of the wild, idealistic, drug-fuelled optimism of the sixties and the seventies, with all the period’s highs and lows: the summer of love, road trips, Kerouac, hippy communality, anti-establishment activism, a (literally) mind-boggling assortment of drugs, overdoses, The Who and T-Rex, Nixon, Vietnam, brutal American police. There is a failed attempt to get into Disneyland after dropping acid, and a bleakly hilarious account of successfully dodging the draft. There is a scary one, ‘3rd and B’, about drug-dealing and heroin-addiction in 70s New York. There is a sad and tender account of an unsuccessful marriage with some of the most beautiful lines I’ve read in recent times about an oasis found unexpectedly in the middle of an aimless, rackety, chaotic life: ‘At night Daphne and I would sit on the porch swing and listen to the trains go by. Was there ever a more beautiful sound than a lonesome train whistle cutting through the Mississippi night?’

Shirley Hughes’s first graphic book for adults, Bye Bye Birdie (Cape, £12.99), is very funny in a slightly macabre way. This wordless book about a dapper and charming man, who picks up a sexy, bird-like woman, finds himself whirled into the vortex of a Freud-tinged nightmare. Part Hitchcock’s Birds, part disturbing unrepressing of ornithophobia, and part Edward Lear’s grotesquerie of feathered beasts, it remains frantic right down to its twist of an ending.

Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole (Top Shelf, $19.95), a disturbed, moody, haunting book, is impossible to describe. Dispensing with the configuration of story and art within panels, Powell creates a fluid, swirling world, capturing, with fractured perfection, the afflicted subjectivities of its two adolescent protagonists, Ruth and Perry, stepsiblings who are schizophrenic and are tormented by hallucinations and inner demons. Misunderstood at school, both by peers and authority, and haunted by illness, the two cling on to each other as lifelines. Meanwhile, a very old grandmother lies dying on their living room sofa, Ruth is pursued by imaginary swarms of insects and Perry’s obstinate visions of a tiny old gnome drives him into frenetic drawing. Black has never seemed blacker and more shadowy in Powell’s stark palette. It’s not an easy book, in the way, say, Ulysses isn’t (and the comparisons with Joyce are not misplaced) but it is rewarding in a similar way and its dark brilliance marks Powell as a writer-artist of genius.

BOOKS DISCUSSED:
1) Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, Logicomix (Bloomsbury, £16.99).
2) Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar, £12.99).
3) Studs Terkel, Working, adapted by Harvey Pekar (The New Press, $22.95).
4) Jason, Low Moon (Fantagraphics, $24.99).
5) Joe Daly, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (Fantagraphics, $22.99).
6) Paul Hornschemeier, All and Sundry (Fantagraphics, $29.99).
7) Bruce Paley, illustrated by Carol Swain, Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ’N’ Roll Life (Fantagraphics, $19.99).
Shirley Hughes, Bye Bye Birdie (Cape, £12.99).
9) Nate Powell, Swallow Me Whole (Top Shelf, $19.95).

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In The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings, the acclaimed biographer of Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann, has written a magnificent, gripping account of the contrarieties that were held together, in balance, in Maugham’s personality. An aloof, private socialite; an extremely hardworking celebrity; a socialist patriot who loved titles and the aristocracy; a man who ‘tried to persuade [himself] that [he] was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of [him] was queer – whereas really it was the other way round’; one of the most famous writers on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century but never recognised by the critical intelligentsia – Hastings gets under the skin of this fascinating man, to expose the polarities that informed his rich life, one fuller than most.

Maugham produced nine books of fiction and non-fiction, all the while wanting to make it really as a dramatist, before he hit paydirt with his play Lady Frederick in 1907. From this point on, there was no looking back. But by the time of his last play, Sheppey, in 1933, he was done with the world of the theatre, which he found almost hateful, and only wanted to concentrate on his fiction, considering that his real writing. He was an acknowledged master of the short-story form and a great deal of his fiction was based on material provided by his extensive travels, especially to South-East Asia and the Far East. His first trip to the tropics was in 1916 and he kept exploring the region with absolute fascination until the early 1920s. His finest short-story collections, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933), were inspired by these travels. They were all undertaken in the company of the colourful Gerald Haxton, the man who was his lover, secretary, and companion for thirty years. The relationship became increasingly unhappy and ended in tragedy when Maugham was seventy. His other big relationship, with Alan Searle, a working-class boy thirty years his junior, began in 1928 and was to continue until Maugham’s death. Maugham’s old age was of ‘unrelieved anguish’, a lot of it caused by the bitter relationship with his daughter, Liza.

Hastings has approached the life with warmth and sympathy but never cravenness or hero-worship. She has a dry, elegant wit and a fine line in irony, allowing the facts to speak for themselves, rather than hectoring the reader to respond in a particular way. Her Maugham, fallible, complicated, an unhappy man capable of enjoying life enormously, lives and breathes in these pages.

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Al Qatif, on the eastern coast of the country, seems remote but the knowledge that this is a predominantly Shi’ite region brings a different kind of particularity to bear on the remoteness: the Shi’ites are an oppressed and heavily monitored minority group in the country. While this remains unarticulated in the novel, it can only magnify the isolation that comes with the narrator’s knowledge of her sexual otherness in a country not known for its liberal attitudes towards sexuality.

The sixteen-year-old narrator remains unnamed throughout as she gives a raw and immediate account of her relationship with a glamorous, possessive, intense peer, named Dai, in a girls’ school. In his new book, Inside the Kingdom, Robert Lacey writes of how it is common for Saudi women, sealed off hermetically from any kind of male contact, to form lesbian attachments. The Others is the first firsthand account to come to us of this state of affairs. It opens a door into one of the darkest and least-known corners of this society and the view is revelatory, sometimes shocking, always compelling. Who knew of the existence of a thriving online community indulging in homoerotic chats and interactions at night, after the censors have gone home? Or of underground lesbian parties and trysts in hotels, all conducted with utmost secrecy?

Despite the intricately metaphorical language of the book, and its dense, flammable subjectivity, both of which can make the prose a bit viscous and claustrophobic, one of the most conspicuous markers of the narratorial voice is the all-consuming sense of guilt, shame and fear. Inseparable from the erotic longing and intimacy that are at the heart of the book, they create for a unique, not wholly pleasant reading experience.

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His head full of stifled screaming, his sleep beset by recurring nightmares, Small enters a private hell of an incommunicably huge magnitude, a situation exaggerated by his mother’s simmering fury. It finds its perfect expression in a full-page panel of endlessly recessive silently screaming heads, nested within each other, drawn in black, a departure from the book’s dominant palette of greys, and saturated with wrenching anguish and frustration. A visit to a kind therapist brings some rain of affection on his parched soul but also the bitter knowledge that his mother doesn’t love him. From this point on, Small’s difficult road to redemption begins. Central to this are two more shocking revelations which it wouldn’t do to give away. Towards the end, the thirty-year-old Small drives all the way from upstate New York to Detroit to visit his dying mother in hospital. The scene is so heartbreaking that you have to look away from the page. And then, in a gesture of devastating magnanimity, he offers a kind of forgiving understanding to his mother in a coda. A bleak, brutal, unrelentingly honest masterpiece, Stitches, with its pellucid shades of grey and white, is its own evidence of the salvation that Small found.

At the very opposite end of the scale is Bryan Talbot’s utterly delightful steampunk ‘scientific-romance thriller’, Grandville. Set in an alternative universe where Britain has lost the Napoleonic war and, after two hundred years of French domination, has only managed to gain recent independence, Grandville is best seen as part of the hommage mode. Clearly, the most conspicuous homage is to the 19th-century French cartoonist, Jean Ignace Gérard, whose nom de plume was ‘J.J. Grandville’ and who drew animal-headed people; Talbot’s book, too, is entirely peopled by these creatures. The other abiding presence is that of Albert Robida (1848-1926), the French artist and writer who did so much to imagine and realise what the future looks like.

Grandville opens in classy thriller fashion: a stunning chase sequence prelude, full of guns and explosions and blood and high-precision, deep-focus drawing, before the titles begin to roll. The story: Detective Inspector Archie LeBrock (badger) of Scotland Yard, accompanied by his Watson, Detective Ratzi (a monocle-wearing rat), fetches up in belle époque Grandville (Paris) to investigate the murder of British cultural attaché, Raymond Leigh-Otter. France is a cauldron of anti-British hatred, fomented by its newspapers and the rabidly nationalistic rightwing ruling party. This is not helped by the recent Robida Tower outrage, the destruction of a huge, iconic building, allegedly by British anarchists who flew a dirigible packed with explosives into it (geddit?).

In a twisty, gripping plot, mined with deep danger, LeBrock uncovers a nasty conspiracy in high places. The contemporary political resonances are sharp and pointed: as an amoral arms-dealer remarks, ‘An empire needs to be at war … it’s its engine, its driving force … and … we need Britain’s oil.’ It’s a playful, allusive book in which there’s a witty touch or deliciously knowing in-joke on almost every page: the French press whipping up Anglophobia; LeBrock’s Holmes-like unpacking of apparently innocent signs, which yield vital information, when he makes his first appearance; the drug-addled Milou/Snowy, dreaming of plotlines of Tintin books in his opium-induced stupors. The numerous fight sequences are simply cracking, especially the beautifully rendered sprays of blood and, throughout, the glossy gorgeousness fills your eyes.

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How did a book about cricket, a game notoriously unfathomable and opaque to Americans, take the USA by storm? Late in the novel, a character remarks, ‘“There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”’ Good joke but, in the context of the book, saturated with the indirection that is its habitual, even default, mode. For Netherland is neither ABOUT cricket, nor is it the much-vaunted ‘9/11 novel’, as it is also being talked of: both descriptions seem to be the markers of a kind of deceptive publicity.

What, then, is Netherland about? Nearly two years have passed since its publication and distance has led disenchantment to the text. For starters, it’s not a novel that tells a story. What story there is can be amply summarised thus: Hans van den Broeke, a Dutch ex-pat who works as a futures analyst in New York, sees his marriage to Rachel nosedive after she leaves for London, with their three-year-old son, Jake, barely two years after the attack on the twin towers. Alone in New York, he joins a group of immigrants who meet up to play cricket in Staten Island and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian, who harbours the grand and unfeasible ambition of starting a huge cricket stadium in Brooklyn. Ramkissoon, it is gradually intimated, is up to some shady dealings and eventually ends his life handcuffed, murdered and thrown into the Gowanus Canal, from where his corpse is recovered at the beginning of the novel. (The book even wrongfoots the reader in setting up expectations that it is going to have an element of crime fiction, then deceives those.) By this time, Hans has left New York for London and is reconciled with his wife.

Written, it would appear, under the authorial influence of Marilynne Robinson’s classic, Housekeeping, the star of O’Neill’s novel, like its predecessor, is the prose itself. Narrated in the first person voice of Hans, this is one of those few contemporary novels which boasts a protagonist who is embalmed in rich, stylish, verbose writing: the long adventitious sentences are, for the most part, deeply, intelligently pleasurable. Occasionally, they can tip over into a slightly rococo mannerism, especially when they become hostage to the author’s polysyndetic tic, but when they work, their gleam is startling. Sentences such as ‘He looked unstuffed, an abandoned work of taxidermy’, or ‘The day itself was perforated by the rattle of a woodpecker’, get it just right.

Related to this is the central matter of Hans’s prolix and intensely self-conscious anomie, except anomie is not the right word since Hans spends the entire book anatomising his existential crisis, even arriving at some explanations as to what eats away at him. Take, for example, this: ‘I recall … trying to shrug off a sharp new sadness, … the sadness produced when the mirroring world no longer offers a surface in which one may recognise one’s true likeness.’ The crucial word in that sentence is ‘true’: throughout the book, Hans struggles to pin down a version of himself that will be authentic to himself and to others. This perceived shortfall or leakage in authenticity haunts both Hans and O’Neill: the novel strains so much for that and only that particular and elusive Holy Grail that vital components and characters – Rachel, the marriage on the rocks, the final reconciliation – all appear thin, unconvincing, as ciphers.

It is this discomfort that engenders the book’s characteristic qualities: the relentless pedagogic impulse embodied in Chuck, or the insistent and compulsive anchorage in New York geography. It is as if they are doing duty, nervously, for the lack of credible characters and emotions, by covering up the author’s own awareness of inauthenticity with expanses of arcane information – the hunting of iguana, the optimal mix of grass varieties for a cricket pitch, psychogeography of New York boroughs, Trinidadian aviana and gambling practices …

Hampton’s initial reluctance to turn Netherland into a screenplay may have been an acknowledgement of the difficulty that a novel which privileges language over story poses. How do you film a book that is all style? The film will no doubt concentrate on cricket and immigrants and failing marriage, in which case it’ll be, like so many of these cases, a filmed version of the accidentals of the book, not the substantives.

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Hilary Mantel tears up this faux-rulebook with unrestrained and scintillatingly intelligent glee in her eleventh novel, Wolf Hall. I cannot imagine any writer putting in one of her Tudor characters’ mouths the Friends-inflected sentence, ‘Anne Boleyn is so a witch’, immediately creating a dance of balance between the past and the present, between what is recoverable and what is imagined. Coming exactly forty years after John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the crucially important anti-historical novel that dismantled the inevitable collusion between literary-fictional narrative and the Marxist notion of history as grand récit, Wolf Hall is not historical fiction as it is understood now.

Yet it is not this wholesale redrawing of the boundaries of what historical fiction should be that makes Wolf Hall such a towering masterpiece. It is in the incandescently imagined – I can’t stress this word enough – inhabitation of the Tudor world, both internal and external, that the novel is truly startling. It is about Thomas Cromwell, credited by the great Tudor historian, G.R. Elton, as having invented bureaucracy, made administration and government effective and efficient, in short, modernised the Tudor state machinery under Henry VIII, England’s most colourful and readily-identified monarch. Cromwell was also the engineer and enforcer of the English Reformation at a time when the tussle between Rome and Protestantism was intense, dangerous and fissile. He extracted Henry from his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon and effected his second with Anne Boleyn, two acts that were to change the history of Europe. He effectively ran the country from the late 1520s for a decade. For someone who rose on the back of Cardinal Wolsey’s fall from grace – Cromwell was Wolsey’s right-hand man – and who, moreover, was not born a gentleman, something the extremely powerful faction of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (Anne Boleyn’s uncle), never let him forget, this was an unimaginable elevation to power.

And it is, first and foremost, a novel about power. The court of any Renaissance prince, early modern England’s being no exception, was a slippery, ever-changing escarpment; you really had to watch your foothold there. Part of the joy in reading this book is witnessing how Cromwell negotiates this vertiginously treacherous terrain to become indispensable to Henry. And part of the pleasure is watching all the Great Events of history – the Act of Supremacy, Thomas More’s execution (with which the book ends), the break with Rome, the thorny issue of succession – made intimate as private moments of chit-chat. Renaissance realpolitik is recalibrated as backroom gossip, a series of ante-chamber tête-à-tête. Allied with the fleet-footed present-tense narration, this tactic dissolves any sense of the foreignness of the past and makes it hot and urgent like a word whispered in your ear.

How has Mantel achieved this immediacy? For someone who has left behind such an enormous sea of official documents, Cromwell the man is shadowy and elusive, conspicuous by the absences and lacunae in the records. Comparatively little is known about his private life as opposed to the plenitude about, say, his rival and enemy, Thomas More. It is here that the novelist steps in and animates the dead puppet of history into something so miraculously alive and electric that it takes your breath away. The dominating narrative point of view and consciousness in the novel is Cromwell’s and to give us unique access to the theatre of his mind Mantel marries Henry James’s free indirect style to something close to a stream of consciousness, creating a subjectivity that is deep, interior, and always convincing, yet always retaining a core of privacy and unknowability. The book belongs so much to Cromwell that Mantel claims almost exclusively for him the use of the third person impersonal pronoun ‘he’, so much so that she sheds the convention of tagging the ‘he’ with the proper noun; the reading experience that results is slightly, deliciously awry. Its 650 pages are delivered in a gorgeous weave of a style that is witty, acerbic, at times hilarious, always original and deeply intelligent. Wolf Hall is a watershed in English writing.

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The voice is of Edward Day, a young, handsome, ferociously ambitious actor on the make in 1970s New York. When he is in his freshman year, Edward’s mother kills herself in what is hinted at as an enforced act of liebestod. A few years after this tragedy, Edward is saved from a drowning accident off the coast of Jersey by the sinister, tormented Guy Margate, who has the threatening qualities of resembling Edward physically and of sharing his ambition of making it as a theatre actor. The bond of obligation that results from Guy’s charitable act of rescue is unhealthy from the very beginning, made sicker by the fact that both men are attracted to the same woman, the beautiful, brilliant, unstable Madeleine, also an aspiring actor. As sexual and vocational rivalries are played out over a decade, Martin ratchets up the tension until the dread feeling that something has to give reaches its climax, fittingly, in a theatre, during a production of Uncle Vanya in which Edward and Madeleine find themselves in leading roles. And then, in a coda, still in Edward’s voice, Martin plays her last card, the one that leaves us in no doubt about both the unreliability of Edward’s biased, blind account and his absolute monstrousness.

While it is difficult to believe in the character of Madeleine, the linchpin, even after one makes allowances for the fact that she is a figure wholly mediated by Edward’s poisonous subjectivity, where the book scores is in its stylish, intelligent, unruffled prose, ever so slightly camp and self-conscious, catching the narcissistic self-regard of Edward perfectly while damning him, unbeknown to himself, in the reader’s eyes. But Martin, deft at pacing, controls her information with such consummate cunning that she creates a very gradual slide of the reader’s response towards Edward so that the complete revelation of his unsympathetic nature comes only at the end as a considerable detonatory charge.

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