The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Is it over now?” “Oh, no.” The Mirror and the Light (2020), the last novel in Hillary Mantel’s wonderful and bleak Cromwell trilogy, begins and ends with executions. Neither one is a surprise if you know British history, but the first is disturbing, the second devastating, because of Mantel’s ability to render historical figures fully and complexly alive. Even Duke “Uncle” Norfolk, the proud blue blood who looks like a piece of half-digested gristle, goes off on foul foaming rants, and loathes Thomas Cromwell, cogently explains at one point a key aspect of King Henry VIII: he sees courtiers and servants not as people but as tools like siege engines, to use when needed and discard when not. Like the first two novels, this one concerns Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith-brewer’s son from Putney who rises to be the right-hand man of Henry, serving as Deputy of Church Affairs, Master Secretary, and Lord Privy Seal and becoming a Knight of the Garter, Lord of Wimbledon, and Earl of Essex, with his son Gregory married to the sister of the only one of Henry’s queens to provide him a viable son and his nephew Richard knighted and his protégé Rafe Sadler a King’s counselor, and so on. What could go wrong? Well… Cromwell is a man of enemies great and small and owes all his status, wealth, and power to Henry (“I am where my King put me”). He knows that he’d be all alone without any potent ally or friend should Henry turn against him or die. As Mantel says in the illuminating interview with the reader Ben Miles after the audiobook version of the novel, one reason for the appeal of the trilogy is that it is both a rags to riches story and a fall from glory story. A third of the way into the 16th century, England is a backwater island nation poised on a knife’s edge, with hostile powers abroad (France, Spain, and the Vatican) and antagonistic cultures close to home (Scotland, Ireland, and papists). Not to mention the people of England rising up in an ad hoc rebellion whose target is the vile jumped-up Cromwell and “his” greedy taxes. Henry’s break with the Catholic church has led to the dissolution of the monasteries, but the King is unwilling to embrace Protestantism and is just as likely to burn a “heretic” Lutheran as to hang an inveterate papist. Will Cromwell ever see his dream come true of an English Bible being read by the British people? Cromwell is a great protagonist! Skilled at coercing damning evidence from suspects and witnesses and racking commoners when hurried, he tries to avoid cruelty and would prefer no one to be burned at the stake. He saves numerous people from execution and or mutilation, even when saving them is not in his own best interests. If he vows to protect your child, he will not fail you: “That’s the point of a promise... It wouldn't have any value if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.” He sees the ghosts of those he has helped destroy or failed to save. He habitually puts his hand to his chest to feel his trusty hidden dagger. He scorns Catholic relics and saints and is engaged in dissolving the monasteries of England, supposedly to give more land and wealth to the Crown, but he is not averse to funneling such spoils to his family and protégés. He keeps half his wealth in banks abroad but also pays for many royal expenses and saves Henry money in transactions with French merchants. He knows multiple languages. He has a self-deprecatory wit: “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.” He will lapse into vivid memory: being beaten by his father, finding work at an Italian banking house, loving a Low Country widow, reviving Henry after he fell off a horse, being kissed goodbye by the doomed George Boleyn, etc. His motto is, “Go forward, sir. It’s the one direction the Lord permits.” If he is unhandsome (“He has small eyes and mouth, large nose, the body god afflicted him with”), he is humorous, philosophical, open-minded, organized, brilliant, calculating, brave, loyal. Mantel’s Henry is fascinating: intelligent, shrewd, vain, fickle, manipulative, manipulable. “Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure,” to the point that he believes his lies. He refuses to have sex with his new Queen and then complains that God has decided not to let him have a son by her. He listens to sound advice by Cromwell and then acts on fake accusations by the man’s enemies. As Cromwell says in the secret book he’s writing, The Book Called Henry, you can never anticipate or know the king and should never turn your back on him. Like all princes, Henry “is half god, half beast.” Mantel’s narrative strategy is striking. Her present tense works with her vivid and sensual descriptions to immerse us in the time and place of her novel. Her narrator often says “He, Cromwell” (e.g., “He gapes at her, he, Cromwell, who is never surprised”) even when we don’t need to be told who “he” is, the cumulative effect etching her hero in our brains. Her narrator is like an omnipresent witness to or participant of the events, like, say, a minor member of Cromwell’s staff, saying things like, “But our Antwerp contacts are silent. Perhaps we are missing something.” Such a person could not know what Mantel reveals of Cromwell’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and dreams, but the effect is to ally the narrator with Cromwell. Mantel runs the mirror and light motif through her novel, whether descriptions of light on the Thames or on an executioner’s sword called Mirror of Justice, or moments when Cromwell flatters Henry, “Your majesty is the only Prince the mirror and the light of other kings.” Other themes concern aging, gender, families, and power. Like the best historical fiction, the novel is both universal and vividly particular. We can taste the food the characters eat in early 16th-century England, see and feel their clothes and accessories, enjoy their spicy conversations, and learn their politics. A vital part of the appeal of the novel is the audiobook reader Ben Miles. In their interview, Mantel said that Miles’ questions for a production of the theater version of the first two books influenced her in writing this third one and that his voice became the voice of Cromwell. Yes! Miles is Cromwell as well as Henry, Norfolk, Christophe, Jane Rochford, and all the other characters. Throughout, he shows his deep and sympathetic understanding of the text. With such a big (38+ hours!) and incandescently written book, it is impossible to choose only a few examples of its pleasures, but here are some: Vivid descriptions: “The blade went through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.” “Latimer smells of burning too. The air sparks around him as he walks.” “The afternoon is damp as if it had been rubbed with snails.” Great lines: “But if you can’t speak truth at a beheading, when can you?” “Poets prosper… it is their friends who sustain the hurt.” “She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark. Now she lives in the wreckage.” Witty dialogue: “This will require self-abasement.” Richard Cromwell says, “Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?” “Richard Rich knows the art of creeping,” Gregory offers. “And Wriothesley can crawl when required.” View all my reviews
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