All the fuss over Hilary Mantel winning the Booker Prize for
the second time for her second book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Bringing Up The Bodies, stirred up a
mild irritation that there’s been so much praise for a work that’s been second
best in its class.
My overwhelming reaction to reading the first in the series,
Wolf Hall, was to wonder what all the
fuss had been about. It took a lot of pages to tell the story about how
Cromwell became Henry VIII’s chief minister and helped him to dump his wife for
Anne Boleyn, and although I was looking forward to the read I never really
became engaged in the book. I found it slow, too wrapped up in its subtleties
to sustain the narrative, and stopped caring about the characters and the
outcome with a couple of hundred pages to go (although habit forced me to
finish the book).
A while later I picked up Dissolution, the first of C J Sansom’s books about Matthew
Shardlake, a fictional lawyer who’s drawn towards Henry VIII’s court by working
for Cromwell. It deals with a lot of the same themes of Mantel’s books – the ambitions
and intrigues of individuals around the king, the violent political dynamic of
the Reformation, the tension between reason and faith in the minds of
intelligent people of the time – but does it a lot better. Dissolution, and the four books that have followed in the series so
far, convey all this through a rattling good story in which it is easy to
become immersed. But the literary establishment and the media don’t make
anything like the same fuss over Sansom.
I don’t want to dismiss Mantel on the strength of reading
one book, but I’m sure that her reputation rests heavily on the fact that she
writes in a way that impresses people who regard themselves as the guardians of
literary merit. They like a book that takes an effort to understand and isn’t
an obvious source of entertainment, because it assures them that they are
cleverer than most readers, and they can write in The Guardian or speak on Radio 4 about how much they’ve been
impressed.
By contrast, Sansom writes genre fiction. His books are often
found on the crime fiction shelves, although they could just as easily be
classed as political thrillers, and they use a murder to provide the
springboard for a strong narrative. They hook the reader early with a story
that makes it easy to read, and convey their observations on fear, faith and
power without demanding a big effort.
There are other genre writers who have written great books
that convey as much about human behaviour and societal tensions as any Booker
winner. Ruth Rendell provides a shining example, especially in her guise as
Barbara Vine. But they write genre fiction so they’re not taken as seriously by
the people who hand out these big prizes.
I look forward to the day that C J Sansom wins the Booker
Prize, but I suspect it will never come.
Mark Say's collection of fiction, Perversities of
Faith, is available on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Also
check out www.marksaywriter.com.
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