Fludd (1989) by Hilary Mantel

Some books you read very slowly because they speak to you of your origins, your soul’s starting place. Certain lines stir up something emotionally primeval. We all began somewhere, and beginnings and endings, cycles of faith and hope, are what shape the course of our life on earth: those tips and tilts towards despair and despondency, and then sudden uplift, are what keep our hearts pounding. Not a single one of us doesn’t live with some sort of faith. Human beings are hopeless without hope.

Hope is the substance of Hilary Mantel’s nun-character, Philomena, in her novel, Fludd. Philomena is a young woman in crisis; she appears to have lost hope for her young self continuing. Here is her internal musing in the face of a hopeless world:

Tomorrow at five there would be no sun or snow, she would look from the window and see nothing but her own face dimly reflected in the pane; but if dawn by some freak of nature broke so early, it would reveal only the dark, swollen edge of the moors, and the web of branches near at hand, and a section of the drain-spout, and the sparrows hopping along the guttering in search of food.

Of course there is hope beautifully patterned throughout this sentence. We sense an invisible hand at work - and it is perhaps Philomena’s own hand - reaching out to touch the natural beauty beyond her window pane. Mantel’s writing is tactile, haptic, fingering, groping. Invisible fingers move across the pane and draw the outline of Philomena’s face ‘dimly reflected’ in the window pane. We have caught Philomena in a moment of despair, but still she is looking, out what is out there. And what she sees is a reflection of her inner most self — the ‘dark, swollen edge of the moors,’ turning into something closer to hand: the web of branches outside her window, the drain pipe running along it — symbols of everyday life and its necessary but mundane ablutions - and then the little sparrow hopping along the gutter in search of his necessities. Philomena is facing a moment of abject dread. She cannot continue one more day like this, she tells herself: ‘I can’t bear it, she thought: not one more day. Her hands crept to her throat; then to her temples and the cloth of her veil; then to the nape of her neck; then searched out the pins.’

‘Pins’ suggests something fundamental to the young nun’s identity. She is about to lose her hair, and it is an event that will happen to her, while she passively submits. Behind her stands the novel’s eponymous character, the young curate, Fludd himself. Today he will act as the local hairdresser; he will remove Philomena’s pins; he will take down her hair; he will remove her nun’s habit and so force her into a new life. But it isn’t Fludd who wills it, of course; it is Philomena herself. She has enough strength to make her decision: to give into him. And so she surrenders to his ‘long fingers on either side of her head,’ and in doing so, gives in to that invisible web of hope that stretches from beyond the window pane — across the moors — and back towards her head of hair, her heart, the hands running over her shorn head she will soon love. To the kiss that comes on the lips of some other woman she has already become.

For Catherine, who knows what it is to shed her beautiful hair, and to give in to the lurching movements of hope and despair.