Hilary Mantel and the shadow of Wolf Hall

Look beyond her Cromwell trilogy: she was a novelist who could do just about anything

Hilary Mantel's death is a great loss to literature. I think she had a strong claim to be our greatest living writer. But it would be a greater loss still if she were remembered only for the Wolf Hall trilogy -- and even more so the bloodless TV adaptation with a floundering Mark Rylance. (Forgive me, but I found James Frain's iteration in the Showtime series The Tudors far superior.) Nicholas Pearson's tribute in The Times barely mentions her earlier work -- although, like others who knew her, he does mention how good an email-writer Mantel was. I do hope we will see a collection of her letters before long. Even on her publisher's website one must wade through the Wolf Hall spin-offs to find her other books. If only she had lived long enough to produce a work that put the trilogy into its proper place in her oeuvre and showed Mantel latecomers how much else she could do.

One of the most striking things about the Cromwell series is that Mantel finished it without getting tired of it and putting down to do something else, in the manner of George RR Martin and his shaggy dog tale of fire and ice. It accounted for a full decade of her life, whereas in all her previous novels it is hard to discern any continuity of subject, theme or even style. The elliptic, controlled brevity of The Giant, O'Brien hardly seems to come from the same mind as the squalid, dissolute Beyond Black. It's true that O'Brien is a sort of historical novel, in that it's based on real people, just as is A Place of Greater Safety. But really it's about obsession and madness and the clash of science and myth, as well as being a paean to the Irish literary tradition that ran in Mantel's blood. The storytelling giant owes much to the Finn Mac Cool of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.

I would urge anyone who has read only her magnificent but comparatively straightforward Tudor trilogy to explore her work further before consigning Mantel to history. For me Beyond Black is the top trump. Mantel often told interviewers about the ghosts in her life, and in Beyond Black the dead characters are every bit as fully drawn as the living. The novel builds up an Aickman-like atmosphere of deep, creepy unease -- and then takes things to another place entirely, where malice reigns and no comfort accompanies the removal of doubt. It's an astonishing coup de théatre. Greater, for my money, than the life she gave Cromwell.