“Transformation is my business.” One of Mantel’s most idiosyncratic novels sees him apply this transformational flair to a village riven with ancient hatreds. On a dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd turns up in a dismal northern English village wrapped in a black cloak and carrying a black bag. As John Mullan wrote in the Guardian: “In a very black comedy of elaborately choreographed coincidences, weakness and self-indulgence are duly punished.” Fludd (1989) Newly released from 10 years of incarceration after the suspicious death of her mother, Muriel – “a square, plain woman forty-four years old” – is out for revenge against several of the characters from the earlier book. Muriel’s case files get lost due to a farcical combination of bureaucratic failure and the extramarital high jinks of those tasked with looking after them, with fatal results. Mantel’s debut is a devastating black comedy which skewered the inadequacy of social service provision in the 1970s through the story of the Axons: widowed Evelyn (the first deeply flawed spiritualist to haunt Mantelworld) and her dependant daughter Muriel, whose mysterious pregnancy is discovered at the opening of the novel.
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