"A Place of Greater Safety" by Hilary Mantel

I have long been planning to read this whopping great novel (872 pages in my paperback edition), but needed a summer month when I would have the time to read long chunks without disturbance either from people or extraneous thoughts of the kind that inevitably pop into one's head more often during busy periods. So I took the plunge in August and finally finished it after three weeks in which I put an hour or two aside every day for the purpose.

It was, in all honesty, tough going at times. There are some splendid passages that occasionally burst out from among the longueurs like bright little flowers in a thorny meadow. But it was worth ploughing on, because the last 150 pages or so really were quite genuinely thrilling.

This novel was first published in 1992, so it predates Mantel's much more engaging Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light), and can, I guess, be seen as an early attempt to write the kind of historical fiction for which she would later be celebrated - namely embellishing a known historical record by illuminating the thoughts and private worlds of key protagonists.

This book focuses on the first years of the French Revolution and depicts in huge detail the way in which political idealism brought down an established regime and then ended up consuming its own children. After a preliminary section introducing the leading characters and tracing their early lives, the main narrative focuses on the years 1789 through to 1794. The Bastille is stormed fairly early on, the experiment with a form of constitutional monarchy follows, then war and finally the terror.

The leading characters are the journalist Camille Desmoulins and the lawyer Georges-Jacques Danton, whom we follow from their late twenties into their early thirties. Their friend, Maximilien Robespierre is not so fully centre-stage, but is a continual presence as well. There are dozens of others introduced too, particularly Lucile Desmoulins and her mother, Gabrielle Danton and a host of other revolutionary politicians.

The story of the Revolution is mainly told through their eyes, and it was this relentless focus on their conversations that I found quite tedious in all honesty. In its first two-thirds the novel only really came alive for me when Hilary Mantel took a step back – or floated above the action – and simply described things from a more general perspective. But towards the end, when the bonds of brotherhood at the centre of the story break down as mistrust steadily builds, her narrative technique works brilliantly.

I also like the way she sometimes portrays longer conversations in the manner of a play script – I think that works well – and the way real snippets of written material are inserted here and there too, like this:

VOLTAIRE:

Nine ways in which one may share in the guilt of another's sin:

By counsel

By command

By consent

By provocation

By praise or flattery

By concealment

By being a partner in the sin

By silence

By defending the ill deed

So technically there is much to admire, and the research that went into this book is staggering. It is an extraordinary mix of real history and imagination. Hilary Mantel takes what is known about the private lives of her main characters and fills the considerable gaps in the historical record with her own speculative narrative. Thankfully, her imagination is pretty spicy and these passages serve the very necessary purpose of relieving the tedium of reading so many lengthy passages of political conversation.

One problem with this book is that it concedes so little by way of help to a general reader. Very little is explained or spelled out. Characters flit in and out without being properly introduced, and the 'dramatis personae' provided at the start is barely adequate as a means of assistance. You really need to know a good deal about the detail of the French Revolution in order to get the most from this novel - sans-coulottes, Jacobins etc - and yet, of course, if you do, there will be few narrative surprises to keep you turning the pages.

I was thus probably the perfect reader in that I once did know quite a lot about this period in France's history, four decades ago when I studied it at university, but have now forgotten much of it and thus came to this with a hazy understanding that needed a big boost. And I certainly got that as I became reacquainted with figures such as Marie Antoinette, Saint-Just, Marat, Mirabeau and the Duke of Orléans. I now feel tempted to pick up Simon Schama's narrative history 'Citizens' and give it another read forty years on, but I won't for a while. I have had quite enough of the guillotine for the time being.

The other big problem – for me – is the simple fact that all the central characters here are pretty unpleasant types, or at least turn into them. They are nasty, self-serving people who profess to care for others but ultimately don't seem to have much humanity about them. There is no one truly noble and no one who comes out of the story particularly well.

The great strength of the book is the way Mantel explains how idealism can turn to so very easily to inhumanity when established political systems possessing some degree of legitimacy break down. Mistrust then develops and can be exploited for personal gain. People end up killing one another – here, unscrupulously, via show trials on trumped-up charges – largely because they fear that if they don't, it will be their own heads that are chopped off instead. A case of live and let die.

But Hilary Mantel goes further in demonstrating how such situations of deadly mistrust can also be fostered by ruthless individuals who understand how the system works and are looking to advance their own interests. Add theological devotion to a creed or ideology, and you end up with people like Lenin leading revolutions using techniques of terror that have been consciously learned from studying previous ones.

Indeed, one of the best passages in Mantel's book is one in which she has her characters reflect on the way Tiberius ruled in ancient Rome and observe the similarities with their own times. She quotes Tacitus:

As soon as words had become crimes against the state, it was only a small step to transform into offences mere glances, sorrow, compassion, sighs, even silence...

Why was a citizen popular? He might start a faction. Suspect.

Did he try instead to retreat from public life? Suspect.

Are you rich? Suspect.

Are you – to all appearances – poor? You must be hiding something. Suspect.

Are you melancholy? The state of the nation must upset you. Suspect.

Are you cheerful? You must be rejoicing at national calamities. Suspect.

Are you a philosopher, an orator, or a poet? Suspect.

It is so very easy in these heightened circumstances for honest disagreement and criticism to be perceived – or deliberately redefined by powerful but insecure people – as a form of treason. Nowadays it might mean that your party leader removes 'the whip', or threatens to, in order to consolidate power. You may get demoted and left outside the room when decisions that affect you are being made. In France in the 1790s it could mean arrest, a brief period of imprisonment, trial by kangaroo court and public execution.

It is in her ability to get under the skin of power-broking – just as relevant today in organisations as in politics – that the great strengths of this book lie.

And the title is just brilliant. It slowly becomes apparent as you read what it means. The 'place of greater safety' is the grave.

So this is not by any means a disappointing novel. It is hugely ambitious, technically innovative, intellectually serious and, in places, brilliantly written. But I don't think it is a truly great one. A great novel has to do more than break new ground, and for too much of its considerable length 'A Place of Greater Safety' simply failed to engage me sufficiently as a reader. I admired it very considerably more than I enjoyed it.

It is particularly interesting to read it in the light of Mantel's later Cromwell trilogy. Many of the qualities that made those books so remarkable are on display here. We have extraordinary research, the imaginative reconstruction of private lives, the fascination with the mechanics of power and the determination to make historical figures live as complicated human beings rather than as names in a textbook. But by the time she came to write 'Wolf Hall', Hilary Mantel had become much more adept at carrying her reader along. And in Thomas Cromwell she found a central consciousness through which a complicated historical world could be experienced, and the result was historical fiction that was both intellectually ambitious and compulsively readable. 'A Place of Greater Safety' is best read, it seems to me, as a staging post on her journey towards that later achievement.

Reading this book is like going on a long, gruelling walk. For most of the way the views are unexciting and your mind is tempted to wander. Occasionally you pass a beautiful or remarkable building, but you walk on and get tired. Then, boom, after twelve miles, just as your feet are aching and your body is flagging, you are rewarded with a final few miles of glorious country views. And that experience - almost - makes it all worth your while.