AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE

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In February 2013 she was berated in the Sun and the Daily Mail for saying that the Duchess of Cambridge was “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished”.

It was not much noticed when it appeared but is now back in print in the slipstream of her two Man Booker wins. Not in disdain of religiosity though: it may be that religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite. Carmel is an unexceptional girl from Lancashire, who finds herself studying Law at university in London in 1970, at a time of great social upheaval. More than any other character, Karina’s motives are veiled from both Carmel and the reader, and this idea of the hidden interior – the unknowable – is a major theme and stylistic choice in An Experiment in Love. At the age of ten, Carmel's mother pushes her to take the a scholarship exam for the Holy Redeemer, a prestigious Catholic secondary school, and persuades Karina's mother Mary to let Karina apply as well.

Even in An Experiment in Love, with a narrator whose life so closely follows Mantel’s and who readily confides in the reader, she fends off our habits of sympathy.

Her dialogues are about power – about threat and struggle: a deluded psychic and her client; a Tudor courtier and his would-be queen. Across each of the narratives, minute social mores press in on the girls, forcing them to compete with one another in an unspoken game where victories are generally small and competition is attritional. Read the brilliant result and you don’t doubt that Mantel could have made Thomas More or Anne Boleyn or even Jane Seymour – “the sickly milk-faced creeper” whom only Cromwell notices – our representative if she had wanted. The books are written from behind Cromwell's eyes," Mantell told the BBC, "so you have a privileged, but narrow, insight.

The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. A couple of years earlier Mantel had published a huge historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, that now looks like invaluable groundwork for her Thomas Cromwell books, but at the time seemed out of the path of her other fiction. Mantel expanded on these views in an essay, "Royal Bodies", for the London Review of Books (LRB): "It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn't mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam. When the family relocated, Jack Mantel (1932–1995) [10] [11] became her unofficial stepfather, and she legally took his surname. Mantel has been meticulous about her facts and dates, but the decision to make Cromwell our trusted protagonist is entirely a matter of fictional will.

One of the best-known chapters in all British history is rendered provisional, as uncertain to the reader as it must have once been to its actors.

The narrative is split across three timeframes, between which Carmel’s narration flits: her time in university halls, and her past both in her state school and, later, the Catholic convent (for which it’s thought Mantel drew on Harrytown Convent School where she studied), which propels her on to university, having prepared her to compete, as a pseudo-man, in the world of men. Later, she was impressed by other stories of outsiderness and escape, told in language that is off-centre. Cannon and Philip Bard in 1927, the theory posits that emotion and physical arousal occur at the same time.