(Henry’s third and fourth queens, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, are realized here, but they’re no match for Boleyn’s Lady Macbeth antics.)
“The Mirror and the Light” is long and lacks the galvanizing presence of Boleyn, whose arc drove the earlier novels. He’s locked and loaded on a quest for payback, an Elizabethan revenge drama unspooling while Elizabeth is still a toddler in her father’s court. The gentry pardoned, and the poor dangling from trees.” (Among the book’s many pleasures are the ways Mantel evokes her protagonist’s shifts in persona, from trusted minister to cruel inquisitor to gentle mentor, brilliantly capturing the teasing bonhomie of young men at work and play.)Ĭromwell’s wounded inner child spurs him on as he seeks to loosen England from the iron grips of pope and aristocracy, a transformation not without peril: “These broils begin the same, and from age to age they end the same. He’s wildly successful: beheading nobles, burning monks at the stake, liquidating abbeys, racking up title after title while enriching his household. The novel unfolds over the last four years of Cromwell’s life, opening in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution as he pursues power for power’s sake. It’s a stunning capstone to an epic that’s both engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement. Her new book, “The Mirror and the Light,” brings home Mantel’s trilogy to the place where she began: Cromwell calculating the odds against him as enemies plot in the shadows. In “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” both winners of the Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel charted the rise of Thomas Cromwell - lowborn son of a blacksmith, sometime mercenary and protégé of the illustrious Cardinal Wolsey - to the king’s adviser and alter ego. From his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to his sixth and final spouse, Catherine Parr, the Tudor monarch Henry VIII married for love as well as for politics, but his most potent and enduring union was with another man.
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