THE GIANT, O’BRIEN

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This public outreach event centred on an historical encounter in Georgian London between the Irish giant Charles Byrne and the famous anatomist and surgeon John Hunter (1728-1793). While the outcome of the encounter is known – Byrne’s skeleton ends up in Hunter’s possession – the exact details of how it got there remain in the dark. At the age of eight, she encountered Shakespeare in a discarded school text. It was the passage from Julius Caesar in which Anthony shows Caesar's body to the mob and turns the crowd against the conspirators. Says Mantel, "Everything I've been writing about ever since -- powerplays, assassinations, political struggles, mobs, how to turn mobs -- everything is in that scene."

Charles Byrne (giant) - Wikipedia Charles Byrne (giant) - Wikipedia

When he walked into the room, he leaned down and tested the chair. And I thought `Well, he'll always have to do that.' And so I knew a real thing about him."

Mantel looks a bit like a fairy-tale character herself. She has translucent, pale skin. And baby fine blond hair. Her great blue eyes put me in mind of lake waters -- reflective surfaces suggestive of great depth. Meeting with her in Toronto, she admits that The Giant, O'Brien is not quite the story she set out to write. The Giant, O'Brien is an elegy for Ireland's disappearing culture. But it is also a horror story. The ghoulishness that surrounds Hunter comes not so much from his preoccupation with the human form as from his intemperance and soullessness. In his desire for scientific advancement, Hunter considers only the substance of things: Dead bodies are mere slabs of meat and the giant, a freakish collection of bones. Hunter attaches no value to the ancient bardic traditions O'Brien's body housed. For Mantel, England is to Ireland as Hunter is to the giant: Both annex a foreign property without concern for the spirit within. They fail to honour the relationship between content and form.

The Story of the Irish Giant - The University of Warwick The Story of the Irish Giant - The University of Warwick

Doyal, Len; Muinzer, Thomas (2011). "Should the skeleton of 'the Irish giant' be buried at sea?". BMJ. 343: 1290–1292. doi: 10.1136/bmj.d7597. PMID 22187392.It's an obscure and strange little book in many ways," says Mantel in precise, birdlike tones. "It dealt with Irish poetry at the end of the 18th century, in the time of the giant, when the native tradition and its secrets were on their last legs. Irish poetry was a very specific art with very specific rules. In the golden ages of literature, it was said to take a 12-year training to become a poet. But this was long gone by the giant's day.