Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating, Suspenseful, and Beautiful--but Tawdry Hillary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (2012) starts just after Wolf Hall (2009) ends. Thomas More has been executed, Henry has been divorced from Katherine and married to Anne Boleyn for three years, but they only have one child, Elizabeth, and the aging Henry is falling in love with Jane Seymour, the quiet, shy antidote to proud, prickly Anne. The royal progress of the King and his servants, hangers on, and friends has reached Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, with whom they hunt, hawk, talk, and eat and drink. One young lord, Weston, is with stunning stupidity openly insulting to Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell at fifty is working indefatigably for Henry and England as Master Secretary, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and has his hand in everything else, displaying all of his many talents and qualities: wit, tact, patience, memory, strategy, secrecy, poker face, ruthlessness, sympathy for the poor, and love for his family. He’ll one moment hire into his house a toothless vagabond who claims he was a jester for a lord who got blown up and the next moment tell a ward that when diplomacy fails, you’d better get your axe out while your enemy is still abed. It has been rumored that he was interested in remarrying to Jane Seymour, but as he observes his king falling in love with her, he morphs into a Pandarus-Machiavelli. He, Cromwell, is not without axes to grind for anyone guilty of cruel and callous treatment to his revered former master Cardinal Wolsey when he fell from favor. Cromwell indeed has a long and perfect memory. During high stakes discussions and decisions involving the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, the King of France, Henry’s daughter by Katherine Mary, the supposed lovers of Anne Boleyn, and so on, he, Cromwell, often departs the present to revisit the past about things like his beloved deceased wife and daughters, his violent father, his first and last foray into a military career, and his start in the world of Italian banking. Hillary Mantel works into her narrative many details on the international and national historical and cultural situations: Henry feeling insecure on his throne because of lurking Plantagenents and hostile Pope and Emperor; Cromwell working on ways to transfer the money and power of the monasteries to the crown; Moscovites invading Poland (!); etc. Also, plenty of historical details about life in 16th-century England and Europe: festivals, foods, religion, books, monasteries, jousting, clothes, etc. Plenty of themes about life and death and gender, too. And she writes splendid prose: “Just in time to frown at this, Sir Nicholas Carew has made an entrance. He does not come into a room like lesser men, but rolls in like a siege engine or some formidable hurling device, and now halting before Cromwell, he looks as if he wishes to bombard him.” “A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill sharpened can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels.” “If dogs could smell out treason, Rich would be a blood hound, that prince among trufflers.” “You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. 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.” “He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.” “These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear.” “The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around. Out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.” Mantel’s narrative techniques are noteworthy. As in Wolf Hall, she frequently refers to Cromwell by he and his name, e.g., “he, Cromwell, says.” Why? She could just write, “Cromwell says.” The many “he, Cromwell” phrases add weight to his, Cromwell’s, personality. They become hypnotic. Mantel’s narrator is also given to addressing “you” (e.g., “The boom of the cannon catches them unawares, shuddering across the water. You feel the jolt inside, in your bones”) and recruiting the reader with a “we” (e.g., “We are coming to the sweet season of the year, when the air is mild and the leaves pale and lemon cakes are flavored with lavender, egg custards barely set, infused with a sprig of basil, elderflowers simmered in a sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries”) These touches accompany her present tense narration. Usually, I loathe the trendy present tense in novels, especially historical fiction, but Mantel is such a fine writer of such pristine prose, that I liked it. The book is an absorbing series of vivid, intense, high stakes scenes. Even if you know the history (Henry working through a series of hapless wives in his quest for novelty, variety, and sons), Mantel makes it page turning through her beautiful and potent style, her witty dialogue, her sense of time and place. Like the best historical fiction, it is utterly convincing and immersive, exotic and human. Audiobook reader Ben Miles is great: terse, dry, witty, intelligent; rough for Cromwell; wannabe French for Anne; petulant or naïve for Henry; salty and foul for Norfolk; toothless and savory for ex-jester Anthony; all voices just right, whether young or old, British or foreign, male or female, etc., and no straining for effect. However, despite Mantel’s wonderful writing and absorbing story and Mile’s great reading of it, it started making me feel dirty. After Cromwell playing Cupid if not Pandarus for Henry vis-a-vis Jane, he starts digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on Anne Boleyn by interrogating her ladies in waiting and a musician/singer. All because Henry has gotten a taste for divorce. It’s tawdry. Of course, it’s also history, and I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy to see how Cromwell ends up. He is a complicated and compelling character: brilliant, capable, unflappable, witty, cultured, international, sympathetic (to the poor and the underdog), loyal (to the king and England), strategizing a step ahead of everyone else and always remaining his secret self. Not above taking bribes or threatening or tempting foolish and vulnerable people to gain his objectives. Is he TOO good to be true? Maybe his luck will run out or his knack decline. He will deserve what fate he receives. View all my reviews
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