Unsuited to Everything By Inga Clendinnen

GIVING UP THE GHOST

A Memoir.

By Hilary Mantel.

223 pp. New York:

A John Macrae Book/

Henry Holt & Company. $23.

     MEMOIRS are commonly reassuring affairs. Tough childhoods, promiscuous adulthoods, serious illnesses yield fame, or wisdom, or at worst a battered serenity. Memoirs tell us what we want to hear: that suffering ennobles; that tragedies have happy endings. Hilary Mantel, distinguished novelist and critic, had both a tough childhood and a serious illness, but her memoir does not reassure. It scalds. Mantel does not believe suffering ennobles. She believes it has done her irreparable physical and psychological damage.

To take the illness first. By 20, Mantel was in sudden shafting pain. A sequence of complacent, incompetent doctors, diagnosing what was in reality endometriosis as a bad case of female overambition, began dosing her with increasingly powerful psychiatric drugs until she was very nearly mad. A frightening decade later she identified her condition from the books available in a dusty African town where her geologist husband was working, and sought treatment. And then it is too late. In endometriosis, the womb lining migrates to abnormal locations, as on the ovaries or within the peritoneal cavity. Mantel's womb and various other parts of her person had to be removed, and this in a woman with a visceral commitment to the continuity of family. The disease reasserting itself, she was forced to embark on a lifetime of hormone taking, which has swamped her physical self in surplus flesh and continues to impose whimsical change on mind and body. This is the Book of Job without the purposeful deity but instead the bleak contingencies of period, place, poverty and gender. It is also a magnificent denunciation of cant.

Mantel shows us her wounds not to induce our pity but to express her rage. What is unnerving is that this dark tale of extravagant consequences and loathed transformations could have been scripted by Mantel herself. She is the novelist of unease, expert at unleashing the terror that lurks within the mundane. (I read my first Mantel years ago because the blurb promised me ''a Middle Eastern 'Turn of the Screw,' with an insidious power to grip.'') Much of her memoir describes her childhood, inviting the irresistible question we ask of writers: When and how did you become what you are?

Mantel was born in the grim little town of Hadfield, near Manchester, first child to a poor Catholic family of Irish descent. She was an ambitious, cheerful child, small in stature, large in hopes, and through her preschool days her clustered kin lovingly indulged her flaring imagination: a tepee with its own chair inside pitched on her grandmother's floor, a great-aunt earnestly confessing her sins to a 5-year-old priest. Mantel also looked toward liberating transformations. Was she not unfeminine in her rejection of tedious female concerns; in her vigor, audacity and taste for battle? Had not her mother told her that she had been born with long black hair, while now her hair was pale? She was accordingly confident that in time she would turn into a boy and take up either of her two preferred destinies, Arthurian knight or Indian brave.

Then she suffered the first of a series of fevers, to emerge not a warrior-in-waiting but a frail, irremediably female child, and knew her destiny had been altered without her consent. She was projected into the crippling tedium and unintelligible torments of a rough Catholic primary school, which was, she realized incredulously, obligatory. Nothing in her energetic infancy had been obligatory. The school's perverse rituals, its riddling speech (''Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?'') reduced this tough, inventive, highly verbal child to silent weeping and unspecific illnesses. She was labeled by a fool of a doctor -- the first in that ominous line of medical fools -- ''Little Miss Neverwell.'' Mantel, early persuaded of words' magical power, furiously resented that casual, prophetic ''naming.''

Meanwhile there was malaise at home. Her mother, herself stifling under poverty and the dictates of respectability, rebelled. She moved to a house away from the kin, installed her lover there along with her three children, reduced her husband to lodger status and fractured Mantel's intimacy with her beloved people down the hill.

At 7, Mantel took instruction to prepare her for the sacraments. A natural metaphysician (the doctrine of transubstantiation especially delighted her), she waited patiently for her due infusion of grace. Instead one ordinary morning something else came: a terrifying something ''as high as a child of 2'' manifesting in the rough grass beyond the new house. ''Within the space of a thought'' it was inside her, ''a body inside my body,'' and ''grace . . . runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.'' Mantel acknowledges that after this event, she was always more or less ''ashamed and afraid.''

What had happened? What was this vile thing that had possessed her? A ''realization'' of vulgar Catholic teachings intensified by shame at the masked improprieties within her household? Perhaps. There is an archaic dimension in Mantel's sensibility, a sense of malign spirits moving under the surface of things, which makes that brisk modern explanation seem glib.

When Mantel was 10 her mother decamped with lover and children to another town to begin what was declared to be a new life. Mantel did not see her father again. In exchange she gained a peaceful school, an aggressive, resentful stepfather and a weight of obdurately cherished memories.

Mantel believes her childhood ended at that point, remarking, with uncharacteristic wanness, that her misery was nobody's fault: she was simply ''unsuited to being a child.'' I doubt that anyone is suited to being small, powerless and ignored, especially at the time when, being all character and no experience, we must somehow survive in a world run by unpredictable, disingenuous giants. Seven moderately calm years later Mantel's intelligence and ferocious will propel her into the world and London (she planned to study law), and she met the man who would become her life partner. Then the pains began.

Is Mantel the writer the product of infant sorrows skewed by a dangerous conviction of the magical power of words? I think not. Her sense of threat seems to have begun earlier, well before school, and when the breach between her parents was still a shadow. Consider the one doll small Hilary chose to cherish. It had been named for a dimpled cousin called Beryl. Beryl the doll was not dimpled. She had been conjured out of ''grubby green satin, with satin stumps for hands and feet, features inked onto a round of calico for her face, and her pointed head of grubby green satin also.'' Grubby satin, stumps for limbs, opaque face, pointed head. And there it is already: the authentic Mantel shiver. Now consider that creative-writing-course cliché, here fresh minted: Mantel's first memory.

''This is the first thing I remember. I am sitting in my pram. We are outside, in the park called Bankswood. My mother walks backward. I hold out my arms because I don't want her to go. She says she's only going to take my picture. I don't understand why she goes backwards, back and aslant, tacking to one side. The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, too quick to catch; the leaves part, the sky moves, the sun peers down at me. Away and away she goes, till she comes to a halt. She raises her arm and partly hides her face. The sky and trees rush over my head. I feel dizzied. The entire world is sound, movement. She moves toward me, speaking. The memory ends.''

It is a great passage, easily outclassing Salvador Dalí's famous first memory of sitting in his pram gnawing a sick bat. Dalí startles, but we know bats get sick, and might, occasionally, fall into prams; that some babies will bite anything. We also don't believe him. We do believe Mantel. We are nonetheless unprepared for an infant's world to go into reverse, then melt into an ambiguous swirl of ominous movement. Nor do we expect so disturbingly unmotherly a mother. Here is the crack in the teacup that can open to swallow the world.

The matter is bitter, but North English tough-mindedness coexists with dreadful imaginings; Mantel's angular wit is as unquenchable as her anger; the reading experience is reliably exhilarating because of the sheer excellence of the writing. Mantel tells us she wrote to lure the memories of childhood out of their domestic hiding places, and at last to exorcise them. I doubt she will manage that. Hers are very vital ghosts. What she has done is to invite us into their unquiet company. For that her readers (may they be legion) will be deeply grateful.

Drawing (Drawing by André Carrilho)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/unsuited-to-everything.html?pagewanted=2