Book Review: A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY by Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"A mob has no soul, it has no conscience, just paws and claws and teeth... what does the crowd want? To roar."

People are uploading their Halloween reads and here I am thinking I have just lived through the scariest book experience yet... a bone-chilling account of The Terror of the French Revolution through the eyes of Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins, as well as their wives.

For there is nothing as frightening as idealism and "vertu" gone wrong in the face of mindless mob rule.

Mantel is a resurrectionist: with her pen, she summons these great men from the page, transforms ink into flesh and blood, and she makes 873 pages feel simultaneously like several lifetimes, yet not long enough.

"How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?"
"The people were translated from heroes to scavengers, to savages, to cannibals."

The length of the novel was necessary, to drive in the point that the revolution did not happen overnight. It was a series of violent incidents fanned to flame by intellectuals who later lost control of a monster of their own making. It is a chilling warning as to the results of anarchy, when nothing is left sacred. Its readers shall have nightmares from the true-to-life descriptions of savage acts committed in the name of freedom, of the worst of human nature harnessed in the name of the people.

"What is the point of combating the tyrants of Europe if we behave like tyrants ourselves? What is the point of any of it?"

Perhaps the greatest warning here is the loss of institutions: when they crumble, so does civilization itself. Cousin against relative, childhood friend turned to foe, it became a mad free-for-all. And when the protection of civil rights are ground to dust, those who destroyed them are destroyed in turn.

"There is a point beyond which - convention and imagination dictate - we cannot go; perhaps it's here, when the carts decant on to the scaffold their freight, now living and breathing flesh, soon to be dead meat."

Perhaps scariest of all... is that this can happen anywhere. At any time.

"We are entering a time of terror."

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