A Place of Greater Safety

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This is an immensely powerful book, a tour de force, which drew me so into the times that I found it difficult sometimes to relate to my day-to-day 21st century life after a session of listening. In this well-researched book, she draws flesh and blood portraits of the leaders of the revolution and what led them to the events of that stormy time. You feel embedded in it, experiencing what drove them from crisis to crisis and directed their actions. You see their relationships, their trials and their temptations. Although the details have to be surmised, they are based on careful analysis of the writings of the real people involved, drawing out their motivations and beliefs. Crafty tensions, twists and high drama...a bravura display of her endlessly inventive, eerily observant style.’ Times Literary Supplement An extraordinary and overwhelming novel...immensely detailed and yet fast-moving...she has set herself to capture the excitement and intellectual fervour of the period. She does it admirably...a tour de force.’ Scotsman

When they have enough to eat and when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous tongues and pens to deceive them; when their interests are identified with the people. Mantel has done her research, explored deep into the sources, as we know she always does. What the historical novel gives us beyond those facts is imaginative proximity. The historian cannot attribute motivation but the novelist must go deep into the head, find desire, faith, love and hatred – and in the characters of the French Revolution she does, to brilliant effect. Danton most of all is made real, a man of fear and hope, desire and equivocation. And she brings to life the ordinary people whom Marie Antoinette sees on her way to the scaffold, the glass-workers who down tools and stream out for revolution. I found the book enthralling, and at times it was difficult to put down. Mantel's ability to infer information about the leaders is very intuitive, and this is the quality which really makes this historical novel great. The only slight downside to the book, but bear in mind this is completely down to personal taste, was that at times I felt that as a reader, one had to pay very close attention to Mantel's writing to fully understand her inferences, making it a book best read when fully awake, and not, perhaps the best choice for a relaxing evening read. The writing is so very good. Very Hilary Mantel. It is worth bearing in mind that this was her first - that's right - first novel and was written when she was 22 years old! In the interview that she does at the end of the Kindle version, she tells the interviewer that it nearly killed her; that she put it onto a shelf for decades before it was resurrected by new circumstances in her writing career.Antoine Saint-Just: A young radical ex-poet, formerly emprisionné. A partisan of Robespierre's with significant ambitions of his own. Probably related to Camille, somehow.

A Place of Greater Safety is a 1992 historical novel by Hilary Mantel, about the French Revolution of 1789. It was the first novel she wrote, but her third to be published. It chronicles the Revolution through the dynamic relationships between three of its central players: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. The novel is basically structured as a dramatized triple biography, covering almost the entirety of their intertwined lives from their respective formative years in the 1760s and 1770s all the way to the executions of the former two at the height of the Reign of Terror. Much, much more than a historical novel, this is an addictive study of power, and the price that must be paid for it...a triumph.’ Cosmopolitan It is notable for being fairly epic in scope while maintaining an intimate tone and character-driven focus, and for averting Hollywood History. It also features vast supporting cast, all of whom are real historical figures.Contrary to the tendency in Anglophone media to focus on the crumbling of "l'Ancien Regime," A Place of Greater Safety is explicitly told through the eyes of the revolutionaries, opting to explore the lives of the previously-unknown men and women who gained fame and infamy in the swells of the Great Revolution. Gabrielle Danton: A royalist surrounded my revolutionaries. Willfully naive but principled, and subtler than others give her credit for.

Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles: An young reformist aristocrat and legal dignitary, filthy rich and idle. Later called a "Dantonist". A gambler. Georges-Jacques Danton: A gifted, pragmatic, ambitious young lawyer. "Erotically ugly" and thuggish in appearance due to a violent animal husbandry incident in his childhood. Married to: Mantel uses the leaders of the Revolution – Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmouslins – as the pivotal characters, which, of course, they were, but also manages to use their characters and positions to give information about lesser known characters, such as Lucille Desmoulins, without whom the revolution may not have run in the same way. This may be how it was for Madame Guillotine, or it may be the author's detailing, but this happens over and over again.Even so, buying A Place of Greater Safety was still a bit of a whim, as I didn't have much time in which to choose, but was still desperate to be exposed to Mantel's writing. Being very interested in history, particularly the French Revolution (in which the novel is set), the book turned out to be the perfect choice for me, as Mantle's ability to seamlessly interweave fact with fiction proved to be excellent. Mantel grew up in Hadfield, Derbyshire, a stony town so windswept she was 11 years old before she saw a real rose. Her family was part of a beached and declining Irish Catholic population of immigrant workers: her mother was a mill-girl, her grandmother did not have the luxury of knowing her own birthday. Mantel’s grandfather served in North Africa and her memory of him is thronged by the men who did not come home. At the age of four, she walked into school knowing how to load a machine-gun belt, and waiting for the moment she would become a boy. “My best days,” she writes of this moment, “were behind me.”

The novel is written in darting, suggestive sentences; the dialogue, in all its stoical tones and elements of good and bad humour, is like a chorus, or a commentary on life and its hardships. Using hints and clues, a deceptive indirection, Mantel allows us to enter the wounded spirit of her giant and the restless mind of the inquiring and ambitious doctor-cum-bodysnatcher. Their circling of each other is conducted with slow subtlety, but also with an unsparing sense of doom. Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian If she was not available - and she was executed before him - I would invite Maximilien Robespierre. Mind you, I doubt if he would accept - he wasn't quite a recluse, but he was not a social adept. Kept his energies focussed on the task in hand, which for him, was to improve the wellbeing and lives of the poor people of France. I liked his gentility and kindness. A gripping tale based on historical events, extremely well read, each character having his own voice.The arc of the third and longest part of the trilogy is framed by a conversation between Cromwell and the Spanish ambassador: “What will you do,” asks the ambassador, “when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?” Cromwell’s downfall and death are a matter of fact; Mantel’s skill is never to let the tension drop as the mythologised life of an ordinary man, with no pedigree, unravels amid the treachery of a class-based realpolitik. Mantel Pieces (2020) Maximilien Robespierre: An earnest young provincial lawyer; slight, sober, and punctilious. He is unassuming, reliable, and competent, but a bore. Abhors the sight of blood. While the afterlife is mundane, the real world is re-cast as anarchic purgatory, with night closing in on its “perjured ministers and burnt out paedophiles …” Alison is also haunted by apparitions far more sinister than cardigan-hunting grannies, including her lecherous spirit guide Morris. Dark hints intrude, suggestions of a childhood in which he played some despicable part: a mother who prostituted her own under-aged daughter; feral dogs with a taste for human flesh; a disembodied head floating in the bath. This feels agonisingly literal, but we sense that Mantel intends these vulgar, rampaging demons to stand in also for dislodged fragments of memory, the novel reaching for metaphor to make its point, which is of course about the everyday world, not the spiritual one. We might, it suggests, be just as likely to find hell growing up in a rundown house in Aldershot as anywhere else. Camille Desmoulins: The sweetheart of the Revolution. A provocateur with a vulnerable-yet-audacious charm, he is Robespierre's childhood friend and Danton's right-hand man. Outwardly dashing, sensitive, and polite, Camille has a strange and destructive personality. Married to: In a word of warning, if you know nothing about the French Revolution, this is not the best book from which to increase your knowledge. It helped that I had some idea of dates and times and events and, to a lesser degree, persons from that cataclysmic time in the history of France. Get out your encyclopaedias, your Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy, and there is always good old Google.