Afternoon:
10°c
Not one of this year's Man Booker shortlisted novels is set in the present. Perhaps we don't have any contemporary stories to tell?
The nearest any of them comes to that is JM Coetzee's superb fictionalised memoir, Summertime, which goes back to the Seventies with a harsh picture of what kind of man he was as he wrote his first novels.
Sarah Waters' teasing haunted house story, The Little Stranger, goes back to Forties' Warwickshire; Simon Mawer's The Glass Room is in Thirties' Czechoslovakia; AS Byatt's The Children's Book is back to the years leading up to the First World War; and Adam Foulds's novel about the poet John Clare returns to Epping Forest in the 1840s.
But Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall crowns them all by focusing in fantastic detail on court life in the years 1529 to 1535, from the fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the execution of Sir Thomas More.
There has never been a stronger favourite for the Booker, and it has rightly been praised for re-inventing the very possibilities of the historical novel.
Written entirely in the present tense, eschewing archaic dialogue, Mantel takes us right into the thought processes of her hero, Thomas Cromwell, as he manoeuvres himself into power in the court of Henry VIII.
Mantel's prose has the unarguable certainty of Muriel Spark, so that the reader never questions how she knows so much about the period or her interpretation of events.
That's a remarkable achievement because her portrayal of Cromwell has been roundly contested by specialist historians, including John Guy in these pages.
It is with shock that you realise this brilliant book finishes with Henry only on his second marriage and that Cromwell hasn't arrived at Wolf Hall. Mantel will carry on the story in at least one more volume.
Wolf Hall is already a remarkable advent in historical fiction.
It seems highly unlikely the judges will be inclined to give the prize to any of the other shortlisted books.
