Cromwell hasn’t just risen in the king’s court, he has been elevated
in Mantel’s handling, so that the lowborn son whose coarseness so irked
the lords is this novel’s guiding presence. This time around it is
Cromwell’s humor, sensitivity, and reason set against the vulgarity of
the dignitaries. It is a tidy sleight of hand.
Hilary Mantel
Photograph by Jane Bown.
The level of detail in both books is so excessive that with a
charmless narrator a reader would feel lectured. But Cromwell is
exceptionally entertaining. Along with his grief, professionalism, and
toughness is his sense of humor, Mantel’s sense of humor. Everything in
the book is very funny, never more so than when Cromwell’s mind is
turning a polite formal meeting into something so much darker.
Gruesomeness is blinked at with macabre glee. At a polite formal
interview Cromwell notes of Anne’s doomed brother George: “Today he
wears white velvet over red silk, scarlet rippling from each gash. He is
reminded of a picture he saw once in the Low Countries, of a saint
being flayed alive.” Mantel isn’t done yet: “The skin of the man’s
calves was folded neatly over his ankles, like soft boots.”
As the noose tightens, and Cromwell focuses on the Queen, so does
Mantel's verve and wit, the courtliness giving way to ribald vulgarity,
the queen's womb a point of conjecture. Cromwell holds interviews with
Anne’s ladies in waiting. “Who would not pass time with a man who has
cakes?” he asks innocently of one pregnant lady. “You think I will
confess just for cakes?” she asks. A few lines later: “That white one,
is that almond cream?” Just as she spills the beans on her queen’s
behavior. Cromwell is impassive, deadpan.
This is the greatest trick in the series and in this book, conveying
the deep nonsense at the heart of courtly life, the upheaval of a nation
over one man’s inability to produce a surviving male heir, or, for that
matter, to deal with females like a man. Cromwell himself, less
histrionic, has a one-night stand with an innkeeper’s wife.
Cromwell is still startled by his own survival. “He once thought it
himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his
sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate,
keeps its rhythm.” That pulse is the careful, patient rage of the
consummate professional in a world of highborn twits who never see him
coming. At an interview with one of his victims, it dawns on the man
that he is paying for his humiliation of Cromwell’s mentor. “Not one
year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept
since the cardinal came down.”
You get the sense that he is grimly laughing at everyone, all the
time, even as events become increasingly serious. His greatness is as
inimitable as it is unfathomable to his contemporaries. Part of the
story’s glory is surely its autobiographical nature, the notion that
Mantel has here sublimated herself to Cromwell—the lowborn genius awash
in grief rising above his contemporaries, astonished at the hypocrisy in
society. One of the great satisfactions in watching Mantel win the
Booker for
Wolf Hall was her reaction to all
the “oozing” of her contemporaries, who once reviled her, now congratulating her, much as Henry’s couriers compliment Cromwell.
This is a woman who said she “accumulated an anger that would rip a
roof off.” Who endured decades of professional misogyny and medical
misdiagnoses that altered her, body and mind. The clarity with which she
finds Cromwell’s voice—halting in Wolf Hall—is here ragingly
steady, a volcanic presage of what is to come. It is vindicating to see
Mantel come into her own after 27 years and 10 novels, just as it is to
see Cromwell in his element, still quiet and dark in the shadows, moving
his betters around like pawns on a chessboard. The convincing
revisionist history on display, that Cromwell executed four men on
trumped-up charges for mocking Cardinal Wolsey after his death, is both
tidy and chilling, making fierce sense of his resolute nature in the
face of grief: “God takes out your heart of flesh,” he thinks, “and
gives you a heart of stone.”
And yet for all the dazzle and momentum—the last hundred pages sail
by—its sharply drawn vignettes, moments of beauty and hilarious
vulgarities, there is the faintest comparative lack in Bring Up the Bodies. Set against Mantel’s singular achievement in Wolf Hall,
this book feels not so much slight as a bridge to her next, a necessary
and highly entertaining throat-clearing. Only a writer of Mantel’s
abilities could be criticized for writing a merely brilliant novel,
rather than another outright masterpiece. It is the scope that feels
limited, the weeks in the novel as opposed to the years in the first.
And perhaps that gnawing sense of consumerist pique that comes from
knowing that even now, Mantel is writing about Cromwell’s fall from
grace in the third part of this trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. That is the worst that can be said about Mantel—her latest book makes you angry, because you want more.
See all the pieces in the new Slate Book Review.
