Review: "The Mirror and the Light," Hilary Mantel

By Paul Carrier

The Mirror and the Light is the final entry in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels examining the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell (ca.1485-1540), who began life as a poor, abused boy from a small English town and rose to become the fixer and right-hand man of King Henry VIII. (The better-known Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, who ruled the British Isles from 1653 to 1658, was the great-grandson of Thomas Cromwell’s nephew.)

At 754 pages and with a list of major and minor characters that runs to more than 100 names, this is no quick read. But Mantel’s signature style is on display yet again, and her Cromwell remains as complex as he was in the earlier novels, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).

Review: "Bring Up the Bodies," Hilary Mantel

 By Paul Carrier

If some readers wondered whether Hilary Mantel could repeat the brilliance of Wolf Hall, the opening act in her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII’s go-to guy, the verdict is in: Mantel remains in top form with this sequel, which may even be better than its predecessor.

Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall, snagged it again in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies, which continues her insightful exploration of Cromwell’s inner and outer lives. That makes Mantel the first woman to win the award twice in the 43-year history of the prize.

In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell orchestrates the ouster of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second queen, a spirited, mercurial woman who failed to provide Henry with a male heir. She was convicted of high treason in 1536 based on questionable evidence, and beheaded.

The story of Anne’s rise and fall is one of the best-known episodes in English history, but as The New York Times says of Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel “makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.” With queen-to-be Jane Seymour waiting in the wings, Cromwell quietly but effectively pulls the strings to assure that Henry gets his way.

Cromwell was a commoner who rose to such prominence in Henry’s court that he effectively became the second most powerful man in the kingdom for a time, only to be condemned to death and beheaded in London on July 28, 1540. Perhaps less famous than the 17th-century revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, a distant relative, Thomas Cromwell nonetheless makes appearances in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, as well as in the film adaptation of the latter play.

Tradition has it that Cromwell was one-dimensional: scheming, blindly ambitious, ruthless and amoral. But Mantel offers us a complex and contradictory man who is far more rounded and nuanced than purely negative (some might say simplistic) portrayals would suggest.

This Cromwell, too, is Machiavellian and, at times, merciless. Ireland, the reader learns, is quiet in 1536, thanks to Cromwell: “Mainly he has brought this about by hanging people. Not many; just the right ones.” And the flimsy evidence of Anne’s adultery does not stand in Cromwell’s way when he sets out to prove treason charges against her. “He needs guilty men,” Mantel tells us. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”

But he’s also thoughtful, cosmopolitan and empathetic toward those who are close to him, a man who still  mourns the loss of his wife and daughters to disease long after they are gone. Cromwell is a blacksmith’s son whose mix of sophistication and street smarts have thrust him into the highest circles of power, despite the hostility of well-placed noblemen. Mantel’s Cromwell is blessed (or cursed) with both a prodigious memory and a thirst for revenge, so even old slights eventually come back to haunt their perpetrators.

Yet this most manipulative of men also is a visionary and a reformer, drafting a public-works bill for Parliament that would impose an income tax on the rich to pay jobless men to upgrade roads, bridges and harbors. He believes the king should sponsor an English-language Bible, and “put it in every church.”

And thanks in part to his working-class roots and his early stays in Italy and elsewhere as a soldier and a banker, Mantel’s Cromwell is remarkably well-informed about the world around him. Whether the subject is falconry, the respective merits of various types of weapons, the inner workings of the king's Privy Council or the machinations of European rulers, Cromwell’s knowledge is encyclopedic.

Mantel is, of course, a great storyteller, but she’s also a captivating stylist. When the sun emerges after a brief shower, “the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.” London lawyers are described as “flapping their black gowns like crows.” It takes great skill to write a novel in which such charismatic figures as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn do not overshadow the low-born protagonist in this character study of Cromwell.

The Cromwell trilogy has become something of a sensation, both in literary circles and among fans of historical fiction. In an interview with USA Today following the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel said she originally intended to write one book about Cromwell, but she “realized that the project must be a trilogy.” Mantel is now at work on the third and final book in the series, to be entitled The Mirror and the Light.

Review: "A Place of Greater Safety," Hilary Mantel

By Paul Carrier

A Place of Greater Safety may not be the most famous English-language novel about the French Revolution; that honor goes to A Tale of Two Cities. But Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece certainly is one of the best works of fiction about that blood-soaked milestone.

Long before Mantel focused her talents on Tudor England with Wolf Hall and the newly published Bring Up the Bodies, she explored the tumult that consumed France in the late 18th century. She did so through a detailed look at the lives of three men who figured prominently in the upheaval: Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-1794), George Jacques Danton (1759-1794), and Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794).

The spine of this riveting novel consists of fictionalized biographies of the trio of lawyers over the span of their short lives, although other characters - some famous, some not - wander these pages as well. Over 100 people make an appearance, including the Marquis de Lafayette, Jean-Paul Marat, the Marquis de Sade, Anne-Josèphe Théroigne, Marie-Jeanne Roland, and, of course, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Periodically, Mantel steps back from her focus on the major players to provide context, by examining the overall progression of events before and during the revolution. 

Danton emerges as a force of nature - a large, decidedly ugly, but charismatic and impassioned revolutionary who marries the daughter of cafe owners but lusts after Desmoulins' wife. 

The witty, manic and idiosyncratic Desmoulins, a bisexual lawyer turned journalist who is plagued by a stammer, finds himself in love with a married woman while engaged to her daughter, whom he eventually marries. 

Robespierre

Robespierre, in hindsight perhaps the most prominent of the three, is coolly analytical, well-mannered and nattily dressed, an idealistic and conscientious provincial lawyer who rises to the pinnacle of power as heads roll during the Reign of Terror.

Mantel’s highly individualistic style takes some getting used to. She shifts narrators, and sometimes refers to people as “he” or “she” without identifying them by name. But her unorthodox approach is at the heart of her justly admired historical fiction. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, so it isn’t surprising that Mantel's skills were on display years earlier in A Place of Greater Safety, which was published in 1992.

Thanks to the novel’s you-are-there feel and its length (748 pages in paperback), the travails that preceded the revolution and the excesses of the revolution itself play out slowly and fitfully, amid conflicting ideologies and an initial drive for peaceful reform that becomes increasingly violent over time.

“Nothing changes,” Mantel writes early on, before the fall of the Bastille. “Nothing new. The same old dreary crisis atmosphere. The feeling that it can’t get much worse without something giving way. But nothing does. Ruin, collapse, the sinking ship of state: the point of no return, the shifting balance, the crumbling edifice and the sands of time. Only the cliché flourishes.” 

Part of the appeal of A Place of Greater Safety is that Mantel carefully explores the political complexity of the period and the spasmodic nature of the revolution, with its egomania, paranoia and surrealism, as well as the newfound sense of freedom that exhilarated the masses. It’s not at all clear, as events begin to unfold, that the progressives’ high-minded calls for a new order will degenerate into the Reign of Terror.

In fact, our image of the French Revolution as an orgy of blood lust is grossly simplistic. The king and queen were not beheaded until 1793 - four years after the storming of the Bastille signaled the start of the revolution. So too, the Reign of Terror did not begin until 1793, and it ended the following year.

By the time the terror is in full swing, though, madness is the new monarch of France. Trials become absurd formalities, and the executioner grumbles about his workload. "At first they thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale," Mantel writes. "Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person?"

As Lucy Caldwell wrote in Britain’s The Independent last year: “The book is an incredible feat. More than just telling the story, it captures the spirit of the Revolution – it makes you feel you are living through it.”

Review: "Wolf Hall," Hilary Mantel

By Paul Carrier

Historical fiction takes many forms, with a corresponding range in quality. Sometimes its primary appeal is its subject, rather than the writing. Or it may, as in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rise to the level of literature.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, falls into the latter category, which comes as no surprise. Mantel won Britain's Man Booker Prize in 2009.

The novel explores part of the tumultuous reign of England’s King Henry VIII, but the protagonist is not the lusty, heir-obsessed Henry, the zealously Catholic Thomas More, the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, or any of Henry’s other wives.

Rather, the central character is Thomas Cromwell, who rose from humble origins to become Henry’s right-hand man, before being executed on trumped up treason and heresy charges in 1540. (History’s more celebrated Cromwell - Oliver - who briefly overthrew the British monarchy in the 17th century, was descended from Thomas Cromwell’s sister Catherine.)

The Wikipedia entry on Thomas Cromwell says he has been portrayed in at least 14 movies and television series. Perhaps the most notable was Leo McKern's in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. If we have any impression of Cromwell, it generally is unflattering, thanks to characterizations of him as cunning, ruthless and blindly ambitious.

Mantel’s Cromwell is all of that, but much more: smooth-talking, observant, analytical, tireless, even charming, when it suits his purposes. We become privy to his troubled youth, his subsequent wanderlust, his photographic memory, his role as a devoted husband and father and the growth of his anti-Catholic views, as he comes to question the teachings and practices of the church even before Henry breaks with Rome in his zeal to marry Boleyn.

“His speech is low and rapid,” Mantel tells us, “his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”

When Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the king’s previous go-to guy and Cromwell’s patron in the early going, speculates that Cromwell may later find himself working for the king, Wolsey good-naturedly tells Cromwell that Henry “will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”

Mantel’s writing is lyrical and evocative. The chill in a cavernous room housing Henry's daughter, the princess Mary, is "like a ghost's ambassador." While hunting in the forest, a courtier warns Cromwell, “you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger.”

The key players in Henry’s circle all come to life in Wolf Hall. Thomas More, the scholar-statesman, oversees the torture of heretics and entertains dinner guests at his home in Latin, even though his wife Alice does not know the language. Wolsey is cosmopolitan and conniving, but devoted to his king. When Cromwell gives the self-absorbed and scheming Boleyn a gift of silver forks shortly before she becomes queen, “he hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.” Henry emerges as autocratic and demanding, yet vulnerable and (at times) merciful as well.

So too, Mantel offers a frighteningly compelling look at a world in which religious orthodoxy is paramount. Catholics and Protestants wage feverish, life-or-death battles over conflicting beliefs that send heretics to the stake or the ax. Tolerance and diversity are inconceivable.

Various reviewers have described Wolf Hall as “brilliant,” “startling” and “masterful.” Each adjective is accurate. None is an exaggeration. This is a dazzlingly original novel, and although it is a work of fiction, it presents a believable portrait of a man of many parts who has been ill-treated by history.