Stooping to conquer: Hilary Mantel's Booker-prize winning work is engaging, entertaining and too safe

Hilary Mantel became the first woman to win the Booker prize twice in its 43-year-old history - and there is praise and there is insinuation. The latter is not so much about the quality of her winning work, Bring Up The Bodies, vis-a-vis, say, The Garden of Evening Mists or Narcopolis - the only two non-British contenders in the final six of the shortlist - as about the aesthetic assumptions behind the annual coronation.
Not many are aware that Mantel was a member of the Booker judges panel a few years ago. At first, this piece of information would seem unremarkable. But when it is read together with the fact that 21 writers were the prize's judges before they went on to be shortlisted or win the prize, then it is different. As the Guardian points out, it becomes a case not just of the writers knowing exactly who they are talking to (the judges - predominantly white, English, Oxbridge educated and middle-class) but, as in the case of Mantel, of ''talking to themselves".
Of course, the Guardian, in the interesting demographics it presented about the Booker, was merely echoing what many acclaimed writers have warned about the inbuilt bias in a prize that confines itself to the British Commonwealth. Irvine Welsh called Booker books "literature [that] mimics the empire" while Amitav Ghosh, talking about the Commonwealth Prize, but in terms that could apply equally to the Booker, asked colourfully whether it shouldn't be more appropriately described as "Eng-lish Literature after the Norman Conquest".
Thought-provoking as these views are, they also hide the exact nature of the beast. For, looked at from a certain point of view, the issue is less of empire or Englishness than of problems with the modern novel itself as a literary form, and how that ramifies the ways in which we look at the world. Mantel herself sheds valuable light on this problem. Known early on as a writer's writer - "fiction is nothing if not couture" she famously remarked - for her dark materials and their dense evocation, she was the perpetual Booker bridesmaid before Wolf Hall brought her wide popularity.
For someone who dealt obsessively with female characters and dwelt largely on the contemporary, the shift to history and one that had an unremittingly male character at its centre did the trick for her. Bring Up The Bodies, like Wolf Hall, and as the second part of her planned trilogy on the unfathomable Thomas Cromwell, has been structured by Mantel in a manner where the past becomes recognisably our own: A story about power, social mobility, religious freedom and the struggle between individual and state.
Bring Up The Bodies is ostensibly about the maligned and heroic Anne Boleyn, estranged wife of Henry VIII and nemesis of Cromwell, and her inevitable beheading. It is a kind of eavesdropping on history, where cons-piracies and murmured conversations rather than actions determine the narrative's tempo. By doing this, Mantel juxtaposes the book's underlying theme of the fickleness of fortune with suspense about the what-happened-next of recorded history. The book also conveys Mantel's patented feel of how the world of our senses is not the whole story, of how modern rationalism, des-pite being profane and bracing, can banish the old gods only at our peril.
Superbly recounted, Bring Up The Bodies has, however, none of the disturbing power of, say, Experiments in Love, one of Mantel's early books. Experiments is about desire, denial, anorexia, class and much else, where Carmel, the main character, is less a person than, as her Biblical namesake, a place where portentous issues are fought out. It is also about elemental matters confronting a modern woman, where, to paraphrase Waking in the Dark, "a woman cannot fit herself into the landscape but has to birth herself anew".
Experiments was a book on appetites and the author was clearly hungry and so were critics. As Margaret Atwood memorably lamented, it would have been great if the book, unlike Carmel herself, "could have been a little fatter". Bring Up The Bodies suffers no such problems of girth, but where one haunts, the other is merely history.
In her earlier books, the only good man was virtually a dead one; Mantel unapologetically seemed to subscribe to Orwell's dictum that, looked at from inside, every man's life was a failure. But in her Booker-winning ventures she has clearly written from a vantage point where being unsympathetic to a male protagonist doesn't preclude 'understanding' him. It makes her more palatable to men, especially successful men who need to be reassured on that score - and they, remember, are a major Booker demographic.
Mantel's non-historical fiction was also quintessentially English, but her lapidary eye and resourceful language were always acutely aware of how the novel's form often fell short of reality. They had, as they say of Roberto Bolano's works, a sense of being incomplete though not unfinished. That has changed. Bring Up The Bodies is pleasantly well-rounded and it has brought Mantel deserving popularity - but at what cost to fiction as an art form, well, history will tell.