In ‘Wolf Hall’, Hilary Mantel charted
Thomas Cromwell’s stratospheric rise to power, from the son of a blacksmith to
Henry VIII’s most trusted confidante. Published three years later, ‘Bring Up
The Bodies’ is arguably an even finer work of fiction. After a brief interval
of two months, the curtain is raised at Wolf Hall, the seat of the Seymour
family: a fitting reminder of one of the integral factors of the ensuing plot,
that of Henry’s decision to rid himself of Anne Boleyn after tiring of her
temerity and haughty recalcitrance, as well as her failure to produce a
son. Cromwell’s ascension to authority
is remarkable, but the vicissitudes of fortune experienced by Anne are equally
as dramatic, though far more disturbing.
Henry’s condemnation of his wife continues
to seduce historians and authors alike, and Mantel also treads this well-worn
path of history. Cromwell is employed with the task of executing his master’s
wishes, carrying out his work ruthlessly, and following the vein of thought
which declares that ‘once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that
destruction must be swift and it must be perfect.’ By fuelling the flames of
pernicious rumours, he proceeds to amass insurmountable evidence of Anne’s
adulterous ways, culminating in her eventual arrest and death, and the reader
sees every event refracted through Cromwell’s mind. He believes that ‘Truth can
break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing,
personable and easy to lie, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back
door.’ It is to this modus operandi that he adheres, though not so much out of
malevolence as through indifferent ambition. Anne is, to him, ‘just another
trader’ who has ‘laid out her goods’.
He performs his task coldly, in the way that a butcher might slaughter a
calf, and this detachment, when fused with unexpected flickers of both personal
compassion and wry cynicism, creates a disarming concoction.
A simple retelling of Anne Boleyn’s
catastrophic fall from grace would not alone distinguish a book from others; it
is Mantel’s meticulous rendering of the tale that elevates this story above the
multitude of other Tudor ‘fictory.’ The climax, which the reader has been
anticipating throughout the book, does not fail to shock, regardless of its
inevitability: this is testament to her ability to dismantle this oft-told
story and renovate it in a fresh, unique form. Like the title of the novel, the
skeleton of Cromwell’s legacy is also exhumed, and Mantel places the king’s
elusive and misunderstood right-hand man in a cage of words for the reader to
observe as an eye-witness. Henry too is intricately portrayed, laid out for
examination with all his insecure caprice and doubts on full display: his body
is like an ‘island building itself or eroding itself,’ and somewhere within are
‘dark mires where only priests should wade, rush lights in their hands.’
Cromwell himself has not yet exorcised the ghosts of his past, which are only a
‘whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath’ from him. He perceives Katherine of
Aragon, after her demise, as being ‘too fresh in her tomb to lie quiet.’ It is
to her that he attributes Anne’s miscarriage, believing her to have ‘reached
out and shaken Anne’s child free, so it is brought untimely into the world and
no bigger than a rat.’
Mantel’s observations are razor-sharp;
her narrative is at once muscular and economical. Writing in a fluent, yet
pungent style, her prose is punctuated with startling originality, and weaves a
rich tapestry of Tudor life. She holds up the crisp light of language to
illuminate the past for her audience; they are like travellers being welcomed
into the capable hands of a guide from the turbulent storms of court in 1535
and 1536. She even addresses her reader as ‘we’, thus heightening the intimacy.
Nonetheless, Mantel is both involved and concealed from her readers. At times,
phrases seem to verge on Eliotic ambiguity; at other
moments, the repulsion or affection she entertains for her characters is evident.
So intensely immersed is she in her writing that she confessed in a Radio 4
interview to feeling ‘in danger myself. I felt a kind of moral contamination
creeping over me.’ In addition to the protagonist and those close to him, the
sprawling, glittering array of dramatic personae into which she breathes life
cannot be overlooked, for this courtly masque jostles for attention on the pages.
Mantel presents a veritable feast for
the senses: as with any skilfully-crafted work of fiction, the reader is shown
the world envisioned by the author, but is then able to select the finest
descriptive morsels to nourish their own imagination. The 16th century setting
is not constructed wholly from the fabric of another’s mind, and our own
consciousness shades in that which is not shown, and that which we wish to
decorate with our own ideas and preferences. Nevertheless, ‘Bring Up The
Bodies’ is so sumptuous with tantalising historical trimmings that the reader
more often than not succumbs to the platter of delectable delights on offer.
The novel is suffused with quotidian minutiae, and Mantel embellishes the most
mundane details with exquisite language to enhance their tangibility: from Anne
Boleyn’s famous pearls wrapped around her neck like ‘little beads of fat’ to a
glance that ‘slides away like a piece of silk over grass’; from the
‘susurration, tapestry-muffled, of polyglot conversation,’ to the elaborate
list of an abbey’s inventory, including ‘a chasuble of changeable satin’ and
‘an alb of cloth of gold.’
In the Author’s Note at the end of the
novel, Mantel observes that ‘Mr. Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely
inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie.’ However, one emerges with
a sense of loss, for Cromwell and the places he inhabits are so convincingly
realised that it takes some time to rub the sleep away and consider the vast
distinction that exists between the 16th and 21st centuries. It is one of the
novel’s triumphs that it manages to blend these lines so masterfully: one
cannot help but find its characters analogous with figures in society today,
and indeed, human nature, replete with its repertoire of virtues and vices, is
a constant across the centuries. Yet Annalist historians speak of a ‘mentalité’
of a bygone epoch, loosely taken to mean the different ‘way of thinking’
exercised by people in the past. Professor John H. Arnold posited that ‘the
problem – but also perhaps the solution – with ‘mentalité’ is that the people
of the past are as different from us as we are from ourselves. At certain moments they – and we – cohere
around different patterns of behaviour, and the historian can certainly seek
out those patterns; but they are neither entirely the same nor entirely
different from us’. Mantel thus captures the zeitgeist of 1536, and distills it
into words, and, in so doing, brings the Tudor world closer to our minds than
it has ever been before. It remains to be seen whether the Man Booker Prize is
now a poisoned chalice, but one can be certain that the final instalment in the
trilogy will continue to captivate its readers. ‘The Mirror and The Light’ will
chart Cromwell’s most distinguished years in dominance, before his downfall and
execution for treason in 1540. At the end of ‘Bring Up The Bodies’, however, he
asserts that he is ‘stuck like a limpet to the future’; he has clearly
overlooked a chillingly prescient remark made in an earlier chapter: ‘Death is
your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he
will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.’
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