July 6, 1952

Hilary Mantel (June 6, 1952) has won the Man Booker Prize for a book she wrote, twice. This graduate of the London School of Economics was a novelist before her grand success as the composer of historical fiction exhibiting a rare degree of fidelity to fact. Her book Wolf Hall (2009) was televised by the BBC. Mantel's account of this defining era in English history, the Tudor break from a Catholic Europe, prompted this paragraph in a book review:

The principal subject of the novel is Cromwell’s long slow toughening – a toughening comically paralleled in the subplot of a kitten called Marlinspike who was given to Cromwell by Wolsey and who by the end of the novel runs feral. Cromwell becomes the man who helps the king perform judicial murders, but who really thinks of himself as a bit of a kitten.

One wonders if there is an American equivalent to the quality of Mantel's reconstruction, or the BBC's production of her story. This is the question of a fan, and yet, there is another one I have. How can Mantel, this astute even brilliant writer, seriously criticize the modern House of Windsor. She apparently does not appreciate the slender strain of aesthetic quality produced by one genetic thread in the cloth of humanity. Yes this strain has a gross element, yet it is irreplaceable, and provides a slight counterweight to the gross consumerism produced by the Western world. An example of my point: through the queen an honorary title was removed from a banker after the economic crisis of 2008.  This is a worse punishment that anything other countries could inflict, even if they imposed financial penalties, I would contend. Mantel would argue the family are puppets. I would argue that these puppets are functional in a socially valuable manner.