I hope you'll pardon the messiness of this post, the disorder---this
isn't quite a review so much as a... reaction? response? I'm not sure
what the appropriate word is. It's messy because, in a way, I am still
reeling a little bit from marathon reading (binge-reading?) Hilary
Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. All three are long novels and I offer my admiration and congratulation to anyone who, like me, decides to read all three in order---though I did read several books concurrently with the trilogy. Reading them all without other books to dip into would be a most singularly impressive feat.
I don't read historical fiction (or I didn't, anyway) and the only reason I've read Mantel's trilogy is because I saw the BBC's excellent adaptation of it a few years ago. Excellent, but in some ways difficult to parse, if---like me---you're not an aficionado of the history of the period. Thus was I lead to the novels.
And they are stunning. It's difficult to capture these books in words, but I'll try.
We sit at an extremely close third-person to Thomas Cromwell, so much so that during the first book he is almost never referred to by name within the prose---it's not until the second book that Mantel hits upon "he, Cromwell" to clarify who is speaking. He is, throughout all three books, the sole viewpoint character: all we see and know filters through him.
This intimacy means that the scope and breadth of history is seen through a single person's eyes and so, just like real history, seems at once immense and minuscule. It means that Thomas Cromwell's own history becomes immense.
His life is sedimentary in nature: in The Mirror and the Light, the figures of Cardinal Wolsey and Lady Mary and Anne Boleyn and his wife Lizzie all hover over him, even though Wolsey dies, even though Anne Boleyn is beheaded, even though Lizzie---along with Cromwell's daughters---dies of sweating sickness, even though Lady Mary reconciles with her father.
There's a distinctive scene in each book that sticks out in my memory. (There's many, but these stick out the most.)
In Wolf Hall, it's Wolsey reaching his hand out, and Cromwell reacting not as Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Wolsey, but as some older version of himself---a version that served in the French army, that lived in Italy---and leaps backwards to the wall, seeing a hand reaching out to strike him, and has to pull back into his current self.
In Bring Up the Bodies, it is Anne Boleyn, not in her dramatic mode, but a smaller-scale one, talking of her marriage with Henry VII, and saying that while before she was desired, now she is valued, and that is quite different.
In The Mirror and the Light, there are almost too many to select from. Any of the scenes with Henry VIII would work here, because where before Cromwell's and the King's interactions had been almost uniformly positive, here Henry VIII turns towards the negative: Cromwell is belittled and insulted many a time. Or perhaps, Jane Seymour attempting to go through a speech rehearsed with Cromwell and getting it wrong in the most comical of ways: "I am in a sphere."
Each book is different from its predecessor. Inasmuch as the trilogy is extremely cohesive, and completely readable in one go, each nevertheless is different from its successor in some way or another.
Wolf Hall has aspects of non-linearity, leaping between Cromwell's moving up through Henry VIII's court and his time as an advisor to Wolsey. Bring Up the Bodies is majestically propulsive in its energy as Anne Boleyn falls in Henry's favor. The Mirror and the Light, neither non-linear nor propulsive, slows down, becoming contemplative, with Cromwell's death hovering over every page.
And even with that---it still feels surprising when it comes. And when it does come, it's a whirlwind, almost tripping over itself to get to the end. It's a bare two chapters, and not lengthy chapters, either.
Cromwell's mistake is to begin to think that he knows, and understands, and can control, Henry VIII. It is not his ambition that he is damned for, and Mantel never damns him for it: it is for his thought that he can control a king. In Wolf Hall, kings are likened to lions: however tame, you can't forget those teeth.
At the core of Cromwell's fall is the unknowability of Henry, and his fallacy is to think he knows him. There even is a "king book" that Cromwell sometimes writes into, mentioned a handful of times in the first two books, but at last given a name and a place of prominence in The Mirror and the Light. He calls it "The Book Called Henry."
There are many respects in which the trilogy feels cogent to today: Henry is cruel and capricious, though much different from Donald Trump; but to the reader in the time of coronavirus, what will stick out is the way plague is casually mentioned and referred to.
I'll quote from Ada Palmer's excellent article on the Black Death, COVID-19, and the Renaissance:
The Black Death contributed [to the decrease in life expectancy during the Renaissance]—in school they talk as if the plague swept through in 1348 then went away, but the bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today, a fact of life. I have never read a full set of Renaissance letters which didn’t mention plague outbreaks and plague deaths, and Renaissance letters from mothers to their traveling sons regularly include, along with advice on etiquette and eating enough fennel, a list of which towns to avoid this season because there’s plague there. Carlo Cipolla (in the fascinating yet tediously titled Before the Industrial Revolution) collected great data for the two centuries after 1348, in which Venice had major plague bursts 7% of years, Florence 14% of years, Paris 9% of years, Barcelona 13% of years, and England (usually London) 22% in the earlier period spiking to 50% in the later 1500s, when England saw plague in 26 out of 50 years between 1543 and 1593. Excluding tiny villages with little traffic, losing a friend or sibling to plague was a universal experience from 1348 clear to the 1720s, when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work, those who survived to reproduce passing on a heightened immune response, a defensive adaptation bought over centuries by millions of deaths.
Reading Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, one is reminded of this often: there's a plague of some kind regularly. It's eerie, in its way: an unfamiliar, forgotten, long-distant detail of history suddenly reaching forward, smiling, shaking our hand, making us wonder, will it happen again? Will COVID-19 become endemic? Will it evolve so quickly that getting it once isn't enough, that a vaccine would have to be taken yearly (like the flu)?
Anyway. I apologize again for the rambling nature of this blog post. 1000+ pages of immersion in the world of Thomas Cromwell is still being processed; and I suspect that I will benefit greatly from my eventual reread of it, though I don't think I'll be doing that for a couple years yet.
The trilogy, in case it is not obvious, comes with my highest recommendation---it's a masterpiece.
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