Start Again

“All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story.”

- Hilary Mantel, from The Mirror and the Light

The first book I’m reading in 2024 is the last book I finished in 2023: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. As soon as I read the final pages of the book, I felt overwhelmed with sadness and flipped to the beginning. I was not ready to be done with Cromwell or with Mantel.

I don’t often reread books immediately after finishing them, though I did so with another book I loved this year, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. When I finished that one, I picked up another, but the book that followed annoyed me, and I could not enter its world. My friend Elizabeth, who had recommended Transit of Venus to me, described the sensation in the best way possible: “Everything else just feels like skim milk in comparison.”

For me, that feeling was about Hazzard’s exquisite prose and about the marvel of the story she had created. I wanted to keep living with her sentences. With Mantel, my inclination to reread is also about craft, but it is also completely about her. I only came to Mantel’s novels after her sudden death in 2022, so in reading her work posthumously and finishing her exploration of Cromwell, I’m faced with the reality that there will be no more new work of hers to spend time with. There are more novels of hers I haven’t read, yes, but there will be no new Mantel magic waiting for me—or the world—after I’ve read those previous volumes.

I don’t read fiction looking for clues to an author’s life. Reading great literature feels like life. When I am in love with and transported by characters’ actions and interior lives, as I am with the characters of Cromwell, Christophe, and Rafe Sadler, I am witness not just to beautiful writing but to a great mind at work. Living in Cromwell’s mind for three books has been like living in Mantel’s mind, and what a beautiful, nourishing home it has been.

After finishing the book, I finally went in search of biography. I poured over interviews and cried over Mantel’s obituaries. In an interview with The New Statesmen published soon before her death, Mantel describes the moment she knew—while shopping—how to write Cromwell’s death, well before she even began that final volume: “‘We got to the checkout and I started to cry. I cried really hard, on our groceries and on my hands; they were all wet as I pushed things along the belt.’”

Reading the scenes leading up to Cromwell’s execution, and reading the execution itself, my body filled with cold, hard grief. And also wonder. Because the mysticism that had touched Mantel in Sainsbury’s was reaching through the pages and living in me.

So once I spent my last moments in Cromwell’s consciousness—Mantel’s consciousness as well—I did the only thing that felt right: take my grief and hope with me and start again.