Hilary Mantel, distinguished novelist and critic, had both a tough childhood and a serious illness, but her memoir does not reassure. It scalds. Mantel does not believe suffering ennobles. She believes it has done her irreparable physical and psychological damage ... This is the Book of Job without the purposeful deity but instead the bleak contingencies of period, place, poverty and gender. It is also a magnificent denunciation of cant ... What is unnerving is that this dark tale of extravagant consequences and loathed transformations could have been scripted by Mantel herself. She is the novelist of unease, expert at unleashing the terror that lurks within the mundane.
For Mantel, childhood is a state of war and, within that, a place of siege. All around are the barbarians - teachers, especially, but other children too - who attempt to get a purchase on 'Ilary's inner world ... She is unsparing about the horrible oddness of spending the first 25 years of her life as a sylph and the next 25 obliged to wear floating tents to cover her galloping fatness ... She muses on the temptation to use charm to make herself lovely and works hard at the problem of how to inhabit the mind of a child as well as an older self without lurching clumsily between the two. She is wise, too, to the expectations of the genre, balking at those points when her life does not quite fit the template.
...a highly unorthodox account of what is essentially unsayable about the inward uncharted life ... Giving Up the Ghost has the somewhat improvised feel of several memoirist projects fitted together into a thematic yet not an emotional unity, undertaken after the death of the author’s stepfather, Jack, whose role in the memoir turns out to be neither sympathetic nor major, and symbolically begun at the time of the author’s fiftieth birthday ... Mantel’s sufflated language is best appreciated as the memoirist’s effort at evoking a mythic child-self that makes no concession to literal, but only symbolic, credibility ... Most of the remainder of Giving Up the Ghost is a harrowing account to set beside such classics as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Mantel is a fiercely honest writer. She confesses that she gave little thought to the prospect of bearing a child until that prospect became physically impossible ... There is no hint of the mawkish in her presentation, just a finely controlled sense of anguish and lasting loss. The pages devoted to the operation that changed Mantel’s life are among the most detailed and affecting ... Mantel deftly reimagines what it was like to be three, four and five, with all the mystifying confusions and sudden enchantments that come with early life ... To say that this book is writerly is not to criticise it, but rather to suggest that the art of writing rescued and continues to rescue Mantel from unwanted demons. She prides herself on her continued use of the semi-colon and the accuracy of her prose, and that pride is tenable.
Mantel understands how the inexplicable disturbs and spooks us ... The knowledge that she would never have children is something Mantel discusses in Giving Up The Ghost with an admirable lack of self-pity. Indeed, the whole memoir is written with a deft, wry touch.
Mantel is edgy, all but gritting her teeth against the self-imposed exposure she has undertaken, 'I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.' At fifty, things that have not happened haunt her – the lives, loves, and children she hadn’t had ... Her memoir resembles a strip of photographic negatives: awkward to read but precisely revealing of the roles played by absence and loss in defining a life ... ...exposed, raw testimony to the willpower of someone who will face the world exactly as she chooses; and no hierarchy – not even the Top Nun – could stop her.
Giving Up The Ghost is the least cosy memoir you will ever read. It is prickly, defensive, almost pathologically unsentimental. There are no comforting solidities. Mantel's world is one of ghosts, of absences, and of things unsaid because they are on the verges of the communicable, 'a blur . . . a moth's wing, flitting about the lamp of meaning' ... Mantel is superb at catching the moments at which solidity dissolves ... Absences of all kinds haunt these pages, but the ghosts of unborn children are the most unbearable. There is nothing in general more tedious than an account of other people's illnesses: Mantel's brilliant and extremely odd autobiography - lucid, perceptive, warped into wit by displaced pain - proves the exception to this rule.
The most alarming passages deal with her battles with endometriosis, a chronic gynecological disease undiagnosed for a decade by purblind physicians and sexist shrinks. Along the way, she has much of interest to say about the vagaries of memory, the betrayals of the body, and the art of writing ... Mantel’s voice, often gently whimsical, can also snarl with anger and bite with satire.
As she approaches midlife, Mantel applies her beautiful prose and expansive vocabulary to a somewhat meandering memoir ... Fans of Mantel's critically acclaimed novels may enjoy the memoir as insight into her world. Often, though, all the fine detail that in another work would flesh out a plot—such as embroidery silk 'the scarlet shade of the tip of butterflies' wings'—has nowhere to go.
