A review of “The Mirror And The Light” by Hilary Mantel
I owe a special debt of gratitude to award-winning author Hilary Mantel for her superb trilogy of novels providing a fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief counsellor to England’s 16th century King Henry VIII.
I read the first part, the 650 page “Wolf Hall”, during a trip to China; I consumed the second section, the 400 page “Bring Up The Bodies”, on a holiday in Australia & New Zealand; and I devoured the third and final component, all 900 pages of “The Mirror And The Light”, during this lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis.
“Wolf Hall” covered the period 1527-1534 when Henry failed to acquire a male heir with Catherine of Aragon; “Bring Up The Bodies” accounted for just a year in 1535-1536 when the King’s second wife Anne Boleyn proved even less pleasing to him; while “The Mirror And The Light” has a four-year span (May 1536-July 1540) during which Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour finally gives him the son he covets but at the expense of her life and fourth wife Anne of Cleves is such a royal disappointment that Cromwell finally falls from power and loses his head (the title of the last work is a description of the capricious King).
In some ways, none of the three novels is an easy read.
Each has a cast list of more than a hundred characters, many with the same first name and many referred to by title and nick-name as well as proper name, while Cromwell himself is frequently identified only as ‘he’. But each work has a cast of characters and royal and claimants’ family trees before the text. Also Mantel’s writing style is elaborate and her vocabulary extensive, but she is a wonderful novelist and, for this trilogy, exhibits a formidable knowledge of the history, politics, personalities, clothing, food, traditions and beliefs of the period.
Mantel’s three novels present a sympathetic portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a poor, originally uneducated, boy from Putney who rises to be Henry’s VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and eventually Earl of Essex, while managing the departure of England from the Church of Rome.
His talent can be summarised in his advice to two colleagues: “I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.” But the author does not present him as an innocent, ascribing to him the thought: “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets, and sits in the corner with his quill blunted, wailing and ripping out his curls.”
Mantel’s near 2,000 page trilogy is a literary tour de force. The first two segments won the Man Booker Prize and it would be splendid if “The Mirror And The Light” made it a hat trick.