Mantel clarifies in a Note before the story begins that the church in Fludd bears some resemblance, but not much to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world. Fludd was a real person (1574 – 1637), a physician, scholar and alchemist and she adds that Damian Lewis and Claire Foy as King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in BBC2’s Wolf Hall. Photograph: Ed Miller/BBC/Company Productions Ltd the Co-op draper, the Co-op general store, the Co-op butcher, the Co-op shoe shop and the Co-op baker. Except for the occasional Protestant family, they worship life-size statues of obscure saints at the soot-encrusted

I’m tempted to say “at the top”. But the context is so different that I can’t imagine him as a contemporary – in fact, I deliberately try not to. I think our recognition of the dead has to include the fact that they were products of their own time, and we can’t retailor them to fit us. Some readers have complained that Fludd loses its momentum in its third act. It’s true that the story grows somber as Mantel shifts her perspective from Father Angwin’s battles with the bishop to Sister Philomena’s more existential struggle with life as a nun. In my opinion, Mantel’s decision to focus on Sister Philomena improves the story. It takes what would be a passing comedy and lends it greater depth. As Mantel makes clear before she begins the novel, Fludd is based on a sixteenth and seventeenth century alchemist, so the story must involve transformation. Some readers may find Sister Philomena dull–I did not–but, by becoming involved with her, Fludd himself is changed. Fludd confesses that he normally ignores women, but he is drawn to Philomena. Through Philomena, then, Mantel takes a deus ex machina-type character, the mysterious and unknowable Fludd, and illuminates his humanity. The novel is the better for it. Fludd is a novel by Hilary Mantel. First published by Viking Press in 1989, it won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize that year. [1]

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In a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Mantel stated: "I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people. [...] When I was a child I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were amongst the worst people I knew.” The novel shows the dark side of the Catholic church, not the paedophile priests, or abused single mothers in laundries, or raped teenagers denied abortions, or the spread of AIDS in Africa, but the sheer futility of the idea of good and evil when every one, every thing is somewhere between these two states. In the mid-fifties, in a small, pious, uneducated town, this concept would have been revolutionary. more ominously, His Corpulence, as Angwin calls the bishop, threatens to send him an assistant, someone more up-to-date. ''The bishop was a modern man,'' the priest reflects, ''and what One of Hilary Mantel’s early novels; this is quite an oddity and if you have a working knowledge of the Catholic Church, very funny. It is set in northern England in the mid 1950s in a mill town on the edge of a bleak moor. The Catholicism is pre Vatican 2 and very Latin; heavily laced with superstition.

I find it enough to live in the scene and the moment – I don’t need to make decisions of principle, other than the standfirst decision to question everything. So you will see that, in The Mirror and the Light, the Anne of Cleves story comes out different from the received version. Hilary Mantel writes with the light irony of Anita Brookner and the northern bathos of Alan Bennett:

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers. It is a most neighbourly thought.” he tells her, was ''releasing spirit from matter,'' freeing ''the soul trapped in circumstances it can no longer abide.''''How do I know that it is not you who is the small things'' is a terrible secret: he's a pretender, a priest without faith. One morning 20 years earlier he woke up to find he no longer believed in God. He believes in the Devil, though, because he Yet all of that is about to change. A strange visitor appears one stormy night, bringing with him the hint, the taste of something entirely new, something unknown. But who is Fludd? An angel come to shake the Fetherhoughtonians from their stupor, to reawaken Father Angwin’s faith, to show Philomena the nature of love? Or is he the devil himself, a shadowy wanderer of the darkest places in the human heart?

The women liked to stand on their doorsteps. This standing was what they did. Recreational pursuits were for men : football, billiards, keeping hens. Treats were doled out to men, as a reward for good behaviour: cigarettes, beer at the Arundel Arms. Religion and the public library, were for children. Wo In another 500 years, who and what do you think will be the big subjects in historical fiction about our own time?The story centres on Fludd, a young priest who comes to the Church of St Thomas Aquinas to help Father Angwin, a cynical priest who has lost his faith. The Bishop, a modern man, is concerned about Father Angwin and wants to bring him and the Catholic community up to date – so the statues in the church have to go. This has a most disturbing effect on all concerned – not just the church and Father Angwin, but also the the nuns in the convent, and the school, both under the stern eye of Mother Perpetua. Admirers of Hilary Mantel's seven other novels will recognize the familiar terrain: a vague crisis takes shape and things start going awry. Good and evil begin choosing up sides. It's a situation ripe for intervention, divine or otherwise. In Mantel rejects modern conventions and inserts a Victorian-style omniscient narrator into the proceedings, telling not showing, dipping into each of her characters' heads. She even reports that something horrible will happen on the nearby moors in the future (we are in 1956), outside of the purlieus of the book: she is playing God. The old-fashioned style suits the antediluvian setting of the town of Fetherhoughton (somewhere near Macclesfield), which sounds very familiar: I hope not – I hope it will be kept constantly in mind, so that we can be ready for recurrence or the next epidemic. I hope it will lead us to question our assumptions and priorities, and to ask basic questions: what is work, and what kinds should we value? Why do we have cities? What is education? It’s open to us to remake the world, but a pity it takes mass dying to make us engage. When I wrote the final words, it was only to begin a fresh stage of rereading and revising. And almost at once I began working on the stage play – in collaboration with Ben Miles, who will play Cromwell. Then there is a TV series to come. So Cromwell is part of my present, not my past.

Mark Rylance in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd We hear you don’t intend to write more historical fiction . But if you were forced at gunpoint , which character(s) and period would you be interested in?I would say the Reformation suits all ages; but though I thought about Thomas Cromwell when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t have written about him then. Just look at his portrait; experience weighs heavy.