The Giant, O'Brien A Novel

by Mantel, Hilary

• ISBN13: 9780805062953
• ISBN10: 0805062955
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-15
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. Among whom is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in the old myths. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. He has, he soon finds, come to die. His opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter. Hunter lusts after the Giant's corpse, a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of two worlds: Ireland and England, poetry and science. As belief wrestles knowledge, so the novel calls from a fork in the road. It is a tale of its time, a timeless tale."Mantel's novel is in one sense a brilliant pastiche of Swift and Joyce [but] it becomes her own style, as acute and arresting as is her vision of history." (John Bayley, The New York Review of Books) Hilary Mantelis the author of eight novels, five of which are available in paperback from Henry Holt. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she lives in England. London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. Among them is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in the old myths. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. He has, he soon finds, come to die. His opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter. Hunter lusts after the Giant's corpse, a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of two worlds: Ireland and England, poetry and science. As belief wrestles knowledge, so the novel calls from a fork in the road. It is a tale of its time, a timeless tale. "Hilary Mantel has felt herself into the poetics of history with singular intensity. A brilliant pastiche, drawing on Swift and Joyce, deploying all the tricks of understatement and of what the great Russian formalist Shklovsky called 'making it strange,' it triumphantly justifies and reanimates these well-worn methods."John Bayley,The New York Review of Books "Mantel's new novel is a bizarre and morbid account of the meeting of art and science. In 1782, Irish giant Charles O'Brien arrives in London with an agent, an entourage, and a willingness to exploit himself for financial gain. He is a learned man, knowledgeable in myths and stories, yet it is his size that attracts the interest of John Hunter, surgeon, scientist, and collector of biological and medical oddities. Hunter is determined to add the Giant to his collection and bides his time until the Giant's declining health and financial ruin signal the end of his life. Hunter's calculated efforts to acquire O'Brien and the willingness of the Giant's associates to barter for his bones are chilling depictions of greed and selfishness. Mantel tells a classic tale, rich with the sights, sounds, and smells of 18th-century London."Dianna Moeller, Lacey, Washington,Library Journal "The title character in Mantel's grimly lyrical latest novel is in flight from a number of horrors. He arrives in London in 1782, having fled the famine and violence that is devastating his native Ireland. He is fleeing as well his despairing conviction that the past of the Irish people, represented by a vast reservoir of myths and historical narratives, is vanishing as those charged with remembering that glorious past die off. O'Brien, by the standards of his day a giant, has allowed himself to be convinced by a none-too-bright promoter that he can make a fortune by allowing himself to be exhibited in London ('like the sea and gallows. It refuses none'). Swiftly, he finds one more fury to flee, this time in the person of John Hunter, a premier anatomist who uses grave ro

Author Biography

Hilary Mantel is the author of eight novels, five of which are available in paperback from Henry Holt. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she lives in England.

Table of Contents

"Mantel is one of the great twentieth-century storytellers...a novelist without peer in her generation." --Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle

"She works with the sure skill of a novelist who cannot be unaware that this is her best book." --Peter Theroux, Chicago Tribune