03/16/2020
In Mantel's magisterial conclusion to the Wolf Hall trilogy, Henry VIII's fixer, Thomas Cromwell, is everywhere. Born poor, Cromwell has risen to Viceregent, Privy Seal, and Baron, with more than a fair share of blood on his hands. The story picks up where Bring Up the Bodies left off, with Cromwell, now in his 50s, witnessing the execution of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell reconciles the king to his stubbornly Catholic daughter, supervises the printing of the English Bible, and arranges the king's marriage to Anne of Cleves. Meanwhile, Cromwell reflects on his crimes and remembers his impoverished youth ("we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain"). In Henry's court, everyone has a grudge; key issues, whether religious, personal, or political, are decided according to who has the king's ear; and disagreement is easily framed as treason. Mantel's craft shines at the sentence level and in a deep exploration of her themes: Henry sees himself as "the mirror and light" to all other princes, but Cromwell is Henry's secret mirror, the record of the king's weaknesses and compromises. Cromwell keeps turning wreckage into building materials, until, that is, the wreckage is his. The series' first two books won the Booker Prize—the third, rich with memory and metaphor—may be even better. (Mar.)
"It's the capstone on an amazing feat of sustained achievement."
"Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison. After a few sentences of The Mirror & the Light – a few words, even – you’re thinking, yes, this is how it should be done . . . Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history. 'The past is not a rehearsal, it is the show itself,' as she has said. And what a show"
"Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians. We are lucky to have it. As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry."
"What Mantel gets so brilliantly right are the intimate details that counted for everything in a Renaissance court – the gossip, the importance of sheer proximity to the monarch, how rumour passes through ladies in waiting, the way the king’s very chamber pot is treated reverently…So, to cut to the chase, does it merit another Booker? Yes it does."
Evening Standard (London)
"Ambitious, compassionate, clear-eyed yet emotional, passionate and pragmatic, The Mirror & the Light lays down a marker for historical fiction that will set the standard for generations to come."
Mantel’s style remains exhilarating: It is a conflation of expansiveness and precision, refined across her career, which has no peer. . . It is a demanding novel, assuming intelligence and deep engagement in its readers . . . The rewards are unrivalled – it is a book not read, but to be lived.
"It is magnificent…A masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future . . . Mantel is still exuberantly rethinking what novels can do. Not since Bleak House has the present tense performed such magic. The narrative voice rides at times like a spirit or angel on thermals of vitality, catching the turning seasons, the rhythms of work and dreams, cities and kitchens and heartbeats."
"The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade." —The New York Times Book Review The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII...The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology…. Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times The Mirror & the Light provides a fittingly Shakespearean resolution to Mantel’s magisterial work." —The Washington Post Wolf Hall , a decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story." —NPR Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian The Los Angeles Times Alexandra Harris, The Guardian —The Boston Globe The Wall Street Journal The Mirror & the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the complex pieces of Cromwell’s character while leading inexorably toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and innovators." —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)The Mirror & the Light offers—even more than the two previous volumes—is engulfing, total sensory immersion in a world...As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may." —Simon Schama, The Financial Times —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian “Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex and utterly transporting—truly a full banquet. Most miraculously of all, it’s every bit as good as the first two books, both of which won the Booker Prize. Imagine if the third The Godfather movie had been just as magnificent as the first two: It’s like that. A perfectly executed masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, The Wall Street Journal Magazine Geraldine Brooks, Air Mail —The Times (London) Entertainment Weekly The Mirror & the Light [features] the embroiled, ruthless, visionary hero of Mantel’s masterwork trilogy, the endlessly compelling Thomas Cromwell...Every page is rich with insight, the soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill that make Mantel’s trilogy such a singular accomplishment." —USA Today Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians...As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry." —The Telegraph (UK) The Economist The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel’s genius; it’s a richly hued mural of meticulous research, enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who hoard power and those who crave it.” —O Magazine Vox St. Louis Post-Dispatch Tampa Bay Times The New Yorker The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop...A complex, insightful exploration of power, sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft...A stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times." —Independent (UK)New Statesman (UK)The Spectator (UK)The Mirror & the Light is just as rich and interesting as ever, the pacing and the distribution of scenes are just as lively, and the details every bit as funny...Mantel’s prodigious feat is to have given Cromwell another face, one that he might even have recognized as his own; she has cast a dazzling new light onto the tarnished mirror of the past." —TLS (UK)Publishers Weekly Booklist (starred review)
03/13/2020
The finale of Mantel's extraordinary trilogy comes eight years after Bring Up the Bodies , at the end of which Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded, accused on tainted evidence of adultery. This book starts with Henry's chief minister and fixer, Thomas Cromwell, walking away from the execution. He'd done what the king needed but regrets doing it. Henry has long grown out of his youthful promise into a monster of ego, and it's getting harder to please this fickle, guilt-ridden sovereign. Cromwell negotiates his way past two more queens for Henry—Jane Seymour, who dies in childbirth, and Anne of Cleves, rejected by Henry in the marriage bed. All the time, the wolves gather. Eventually, innuendo and cooked-up evidence brings down the hated minister. This is a tale of ghosts as well as live men: Cromwell mentally relives his past as he heads, ineluctably, toward his fall. Readers may be put off by the denseness of the book's prose, but that's its power: the details of living in a far-past time surround and enrich the narrative. VERDICT Mantel has no equal in historical fiction at setting a scene, telling a compelling story, and delineating vibrant characters. Libraries won't be able to keep this book on the shelves. [See "Seasonal Selections," LJ 2/20.]—David Keymer, Cleveland
★ 2020-02-25Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).
“Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away”: With this perfect sentence, Mantel plunges into the scene of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and there’s no need to spell out who “he” is. On the second page, the executioner, who was brought over from France, refers to him as Cremuel (“No Frenchman can ever pronounce his name”), and finally, a few paragraphs later, when the swordsman is showing off the special blade he used on the queen, “he, Cromwell, touches a finger to the metal.” And we’re off, knowing that by the end it will be Cromwell’s head that rolls. (We can only hope his executioner will be as meticulous.) In the meantime, we get more of everything we’d expect from Mantel’s evocation of the reign of Henry VIII: power, rivalry, strategy, love, loyalty, ambition, regret, loneliness, lust—all centered on the magnetic Cromwell, a man who knows everything from the number of soldiers commanded by each nobleman in England to the secret desires of their wives and daughters. The narrative voice is as supple and insinuating as ever, but the tone is more contemplative—now that the newly made Lord Cromwell has attained the loftiest heights, he returns often to certain touchstones from his past—while the momentum drives forward to our hero’s inevitable fall. (Perhaps it could have driven forward a little more relentlessly; it does occasionally idle.) Cromwell has become almost a bogeyman to the people of England, and Mantel describes his reputation with characteristic dry humor: “He means to…tamper with the baker’s scales, and fix liquid measures in his favour. The man is like a weasel, who eats his own weight every day.” Mantel has created a vivid 16th-century universe, but sometimes it feels like she’s speaking directly to her modern reader, particularly about the role of women: “Try smiling. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel. Not that you can put it like that to a woman…she might take it badly.”
A triumph.
