Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O'Brien

This novel of the famous Irish giant Charles Byrne was recommended to me over a pint in a pub in London by an Irish friend, so of course I was compelled to seek it out. The real Charles Byrne died a young man in 1783, after attaining the prodigious height of 7 feet, 7 inches. Hilary Mantel puts flesh on his bones which, somewhat chillingly, remain on view in the Hunterian Museum in London:

Mantel's fictionalized Byrne, re-christened Charles O'Brien by his dubious promoter, is a storyteller in the ancient Irish tradition, and the mythical tales he delicately weaves for his admiring (and ultimately traitorous) form a stark contrast to the bleak life of the giant who tells them. He speaks of gold-trimmed chariots led by teams of white horses, but plods his way on foot. He speaks of castles hug with Flemish tapestries and furnished in ornate antiques, but lives in squalor. We read:

The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar's hand lies always on his book and ... the rebel has his ballad and his cross ... But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrubbed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day and a week, so his is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory has run out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rock away; and the cell-line runs to its limit where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature.

The novel begins perhaps slowly, it winds perhaps more than is necessary, but it finishes with withering power. Modern science can tell us why Charles grew so tall, but it must remain mute on what it would be like to live as a giant. For this, we need a novelist.