Brimming with choice quotation and brilliant descriptive
analysis (“all is alive, silvery, alert, rapid with insight”), James Wood’s
"Invitation to a Beheading," in this week’s issue, is a model book review in
every way. Yet, it fails to persuade. It’s a rave review of Hilary Mantel’s
Thomas Cromwell novels. But what is so wonderful about novels that fudge the
facts? Wood says that Mantel “knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not
the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not
coroners, of the human case.” Implicit in Wood’s position is that, in order to
make the story interesting, it’s okay to invent details. For example, Wood
refers to the Fugger bag that Mantel says was fashionable in Cromwell’s time
(“This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation
of the agents of the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the
fashion”), and comments:
Do you know if Mantel has manufactured or borrowed from the
record this information about the fashionable Fugger bag? In some sense, it
doesn’t matter, because the writer has made a third category of reality, the
plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between
the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter
what might happen.
I’m not convinced. The “plausibly hypothetical” isn’t
reality. Reality is, as John Updike brilliantly defined it, “a fabric of
microscopic accuracies” (“Accuracy,” included in Updike’s 1976 collection Picked-Up
Pieces). The “coroners of the human case” are writers who eschew accuracy in
favor of fabrication.
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