Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
“Mantel does historical fiction right.”
Hilary Mantel’s magisterial Wolf Hall took a deep dive into King Henry VIII’s breakup with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favor of Anne Boleyn. In Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel picks up where she left off. This time, Anne proves unable to produce a legitimate son for the mercurial Henry. Meanwhile, the regent’s attention strays, and we get to see the political sausage-making that results in Anne’s demise. Henry lusts after his next fixation, Jane Seymore, who by now we can guess will experience a no more kind fate. If luck shines on us, perhaps we’ll get six books in the series, one for each of Henry’s doomed brides.
Although perhaps not. Mantel makes a brilliant choice in telling the evergreen tale of Henry’s serial (and lethal) monogamy. Rather than focus on royalty, Mantel chooses common-born Thomas Cromwell as the protagonist. Perhaps the world’s first power lawyer, Cromwell leverages his position to the unassuming role of Master Secretary, in fact the most influential functionary in England.
Part consigliere, part major domo, part technocrat, Cromwell does nothing less than establish a new archetype. By pulling himself up from his own bootstraps, he shatters a thousand years of socio-economic stratification, one action list item on his work desk at a time. In so doing, he accumulates riches, as well as multiple households of followers. The historical Henry proves fickle, however, and without giving away spoilers, let’s just say that real-life events would preclude six installments.
Bring Up the Bodies launches out of the gate in a medias res way that would make Aristotle chortle with glee, so you might want to catch Wolf Hall first—one of, if not the top contemporary novel, so not a hardship. Put your sixteenth-century thinking bonnets on in any case, as Mantel includes a bewildering array of minor characters, without much context other than a five-page list of characters in the front matter. Mantel also appears to distrust attribution, so pronouns become confusing. She does, however, continue her convention from the first installment of overdetermining Cromwell, as in, “He, Cromwell, leans forward, elbows on the table: then puts a hand up to cover his face.” She garnishes the narrative with a meaty He, Cromwell at least every couple of pages, which for some reason works as a stylistic flourish.
Bring up the Bodies covers the span of 1535-36, a year during a fascinating interstitial period. We have traveled beyond the most expansive definition of the “High Middle Ages” yet have not yet entered the modern world. The English language is in the middle of turning from Middle English into Modern English. Queen Elizabeth is a child. Shakespeare hasn’t happened yet. At the same time, old mores fall away. Mantel includes an incident in which a greying Henry has an accident in the tilting yard that renders him unconscious for two hours, and all but he, Cromwell, believe the king dead. The image of a philandering regent past his prime, blundering about a jousting tournament, speaks to the expiry of chivalric ideals. In contrast, Cromwell’s ascension to power indicates the end of European feudalism.
Like Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies adopts an episodic format. At its best, the book acts as a biography of Cromwell. While reading, I couldn’t help comparing my own professional life to Cromwell’s, which became a depressing exercise in comparison. He, Cromwell, attends to events in the micro, executing action steps in the present while planning for future contingencies. Watching him at work proves spellbinding, as it must have for his contemporaries. On the downside, episodic structure seems to encourage a “just one more” creative impulse. If you’ve ever seen any of Fellini’s movies, which never seem to end, Mantel’s books can feel a bit like that too. All the same, I didn’t want the book to finish. Seeing a master of her craft unspool a finely wrought work feels fulfilling beyond description.
The wives of King Henry VIII continue to fascinate, up to and including the current Broadway musical Six. Henry’s unapologetic proclivities as a royal rooster piques interest (sex sells, after all). At the same time, Henry’s generation possess enough of a membership of the medieval mindset to fear for their souls. They agonize about the sinful implications of divorce. Excommunication from Rome hangs like a death sentence of faith. Royalty radiates a glamour, albeit fading, of the superhuman. Switching the focus to Cromwell grants us a front-row seat into the unfolding play of history along with writing chops of the highest order.
In the end, she, Mantel, sums up Cromwell in a more poetic rendering of subjectivity—a person in an eternal act of becoming—than critical thinkers have been able to articulate in the past century. Mantel writes, “The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.” Mantel could be speaking of her own writing process as well as that of procession of historical events.
Somewhere, on some plane of reality, Thomas Cromwell, the son of an abusive smith who became the second most powerful person in England, sits at his desk still, solving problems late into the night. Mantel gives us the gift of letting us look over his shoulder to see how he does it.