Fludd (1989) by Hilary Mantel

I have always loved sentences about wind and trees. Wuthering Heights, which I first read aged 12 or so, is full of noisy wind and trees breaking off. The night Heathcliff disappears from Wuthering Heights, his heart broken by over hearing things he should not, a huge storm breaks out:

About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building.

There is nothing more painful than the words Heathcliff hears spoken of him by his childhood love, Cathy Earnshaw: “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now . . .” — words so wounding he doesn’t stay to hear the vital second part — “so he shall never know how I love him.”

When Heathcliff runs off into the night he splits off from himself: from Cathy, his other self, as the tree outside splits off from the force of a violent wind. Trees have feelings too, we now know, and speak to each other through their roots: via a secret world of soil signals. Hilary Mantel captures that sense of surging subterranean feeling in her novel, Fludd, which surges with all the energy of a gothic novel, especially on the level of the sentence. Mantel knows how to write a properly gnarled sentence:

A gust of wind ripped at the trees behind him; their branches, fitfully lit by the storm flickering over Netherhougton, stretched across his tilted cheek, in a tracery like fingers or lace.

This is the moment the eponymous character himself appears - Flood - or F-L-U-D-D - as he spells it out to the startled Miss Dempsey, who sees not a man but an apparition. Fludd appears with special effects, lit up by a storm that brings gusts of wind and ripping branches, flickers of lightening and strange patterns of shapes across his cheek. Fludd the character is marked by stormy weather: and so the shadows of the branches pass over his face leaving their webbed tracery.

Mantel’s sentence is layered and complex, building a three dimensional world of sound and visual effects by verb, adverb and simile. We are asked to listen and watch on several levels at once to things that sound and seem ‘like’ something else. This is the dissolving picture-logic:

Tree

Branch (fingers of tree)

Cheek (man)

Fingers (on face of man)

Lace (genteel interior; Miss Dempsey, the housekeeper).

The sequence is filmic, as much gothic literature is, lending itself to the sort of interpretative sonic and visual work Andrea Arnold does in her 2011 film version of Wuthering Heights. As the wind move we move with it: from the outline of the trees in the background, ripped at by the wind, to a closer shot of individual branches, fitfully lit by the storm that flickers over the village of Netherhougton, until we alight upon the skin of the man himself. I say man, but at this point he is still, in the mind’s eye of the housekeeper, Miss Dempsey — an apparition. It is Miss Dempsey who is doing the looking; it is her eyes we see through as she peers through the dark doorway upon the bluish wild darkness outside; at the rain that rattle[s] past her in the hallway. Mantel is careful to attribute to the darkness and rain some of the same wild qualities as the young man in the doorway, whose first word - as she hears it against the roaring wind - is FLOOD.