This is it!

In the Author’s Note for her novel A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel avows that “almost all the characters in it are real people and it is closely tied to historical facts—as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really very far.” Facts are always subject to interpretation and therefore, not really an expression of reality. In this novel of the French Revolution, a subject that has long intrigued me, the array of characters is vast, and all of them I have found to have existed much as Mantel has depicted them. The politics is complicated and vicious and there is an accuracy to this novel that intrigues me. I am respectful of Mantel’s research.

     And then . . . two thirds of the way into the novel Danton’s wife Gabrielle dies in childbirth. Following her funeral, there is a brief recounting of some of her effects. We read that “the maid found a handkerchief under the bed where Gabrielle had died; a tradesman delivered fabric that she had ordered just weeks before her death.” And her husband, George-Jacques Danton “found a novel, with her place marked.” Following this brief recounting, Mantel adds this sentence: “And this is it.” On the one hand, this suggests that Mantel has situated the composition of her novel as having occurred prior to and during the French Revolution. Gabrielle Danton has been reading that novel in which she has played a significant role when she dies. Mantel does not offer any clue concerning what page Gabrielle had reached at the time of her death.
     Reading A Place of Greater Safety Gabrielle Danton has been reading (in part) an interpretation of her life and of the events in which she is both an observer and a participant. But she does not survive to the end of the novel she is reading. She does not learn how it all turns out. Well, who ever does? I am thinking that that is exactly what life must be like: I participate, and I observe. As in a novel I read for plot and character, even my own, and I make interpretations as I proceed. Sometimes I feel that I understand what’s going on--the characters and events--and at other times I remain somewhat baffled. I maintain some control over my reading, my life, and at other times I recognize my powerlessness and confusion. I go on regardless. There is a narrative that I both observe and construct as my life, and I keep reading to learn its trajectory, but really, I am always in the middle of that novel. And at the end of the day I place my bookmark on the pages where I have stopped reading, close the book and anticipate engaging tomorrow with the book and my life.
     But, I never do get to the end of my novel. Events continue even if I do not, and the future is never known to me. I would like to know what comes next, to follow this or that thread that has begun to its end, to remain immersed in the beauty and complexity of the woven environment, but finally that is not possible. At the end of the day I have to close the book and go to sleep. And someone else will read the novel.