In the few weeks before I set off on the church pilgrimage, I enjoyed wondering about my reading for those ten days. It is fun to match your books to the place you are visiting and I had been thinking about something by Adele Geras maybe or From the Four Winds by Haim Sabato. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s tome on Jerusalem was dismissed as consuming the whole of my luggage allowance.
However, I was then sidetracked, ambushed, simply by walking past Waterstone’s window. There it was, due out in a couple of weeks’ time: The Mirror and the Light, the last book in the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel. There was, I realised, just time to re-read Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies before I could buy the third book. Thus the decision was taken for me, it was Bring up the Bodies that I read in my hotel in Jerusalem, incongruously I thought. Or maybe not. The Tudor times were fraught with religious conflict and power battles and Israel is just the same.
If you have not yet read these three books by Hilary Mantel then I envy you, you have this joy still to come. The trilogy is a monumental achievement that covers the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, a man from lowly beginnings who grows in power and stature during much of the reign of Henry VIII.
I have over the years had much enjoyment from historical fiction, Jean Plaidy, Elizabeth Chadwick, C.J Samson and Philippa Gregory among others. This however, is writing in a totally different league. Mantel researches as if she were an historian writing biography but she isn’t. As a novelist she has the freedom to fill in the gaps that the history books leave unwritten and her joy in this is evident. The narrative has an incredible immediacy as it is written in the present tense, an unusual literary device for this genre. You know what Thomas Cromwell is thinking as the thought crosses his mind and you experience Henry’s capricious decisions with the same precipitate confusion and fright as the members of his privy council.
Interestingly, unless you played truant in every school history lesson, you will know what happens in these books, you will know the general outline of the tortured story of the Tudors… and yet somehow Mantel still makes you want to read on. The characters leap out of the page. You know the cloth from which their collar is cut, you know the sound of their boots on the cobbled path when it is raining and you taste their fear when Henry turns a cold, unblinking stare upon them. While I am covering the double Booker prize winner with praise, there is one strange syntactical irritation that takes a little getting used to. It is the use of the word ‘He’ to which I am referring. “He, Cromwell, had seen at Wolf Hall what Rafe could not see.” And later, when he is promoted “He, Lord Cromwell,” or even: “He, himself, Cromwell, takes up a carving knife.” In a recent television interview, Hilary Mantel talked about standing just behind Cromwell, rather like a camera and maybe this explains the way in which she writes about this complicated character, for whom I do feel she has a certain affection. On occasions she does play fast and loose with inverted commas but in a way this simply allows the narrative to move quickly and I find I don’t mind at all.
In The Mirror and the Light, (I’m about half way through) there is a simple but beautifully crafted sentence that demonstrates the gift of Hilary Mantel and the depth of cunning and danger in the character of Henry VIII: “ Henry looks around the table, fearfully leisured; all their hours are his.”
I commend these stunning books to you all.