Bring Up the Bodies is the second installment in Hilary Mantel’s novelization of the life of Thomas Cromwell. It follows on the heels of the masterful and award-winning Wolf Hall from 2010, one of my favorite books of the past decade. Bodies is no less masterful and wonderful a book than its predecessor, although it doesn’t hit with quite the same impact, perhaps simply because it’s a sequel and not a New Thing.
The story picks up where Wolf Hall left off. Henry VIII is growing increasingly restive because his second wife, the former Anne Boleyn, after three years has failed to provide him with a male heir — just a daughter, Elizabeth. Henry and most of the English nobility are extremely anxious to avoid a return to the bloody succession wars that plagued England for decades before the rise of the Tudors. Henry has also grown weary of Anne’s imperious ways and cold personality, not to mention the grasping and conniving of her family. And the European powers – France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands – for various reasons have not accepted Anne as a legitimate queen, which complicates diplomatic matters for Henry, including his ability to borrow money, which the court and the country desperately need.
Once again, it is Cromwell’s job to extricate Henry from a marriage, remembering all the while that Cromwell’s mentor Cardinal Wolsey lost his position as Archbishop of Canterbury and eventually his life for failure to get Henry’s first marriage annulled.
And once again, as a reader I had a hard time putting this book down. For one thing, Mantel has obviously done a prodigious amount of research in order to write convincingly about this period. Tudor England, London, the various homes and palaces, not to mention the customs and mores, are precisely detailed. There is one scene, which I foolishly did not mark and so cannot now easily find, in which Cromwell fondly enumerates the kinds of sweetmeats of which his son Gregory is especially fond.
But even with all the convincing period details, the book would read like just another dry history if it were not written by a masterful novelist like Mantel. Not only the settings but the characters brim with life. And the situations crackle with whatever emotion is called for, and there are many: fear, rage, jealousy, contempt, love, humor, the whole panoply of human feeling. A scene in which Henry turns his misdirected rage upon Cromwell and dresses him down mercilessly in front of the court is stunning. And the interrogation by Cromwell and some of his proteges of Mark, a court musician and one of the queen’s young courtiers, is the equal of any blackly hilarious scene in a Tarrantino film. At one point Wriothesley (who goes by the nickname “Call-Me” Risley), threatens the young man with the Tower and the rack…
‘Wriothesley, may I have a word with you aside?’ He waves Call-Me out of the room and on the threshold speaks in an undertone. ‘It is better not to specify the nature of the pain. As Juvenal says, the mind is its own best torturer. Besides, you should not make empty threats. I will not rack him. I do not want him carried to his trial in a chair. And if I needed to rack a sad little fellow like this … what next? Stamping on dormice?’
‘I am reproved,’ Mr. Wriothesley says.
He puts his hand on Wriothesley’s arm. ‘Never mind. You are doing very well.’
And thus, almost casually, begins Anne Boleyn’s downfall.
I was enthralled time and again by such brief episodes in Mantel’s book. Many sent me to a dictionary to look up the meaning of some archaic word. And some sent me to the reference books to puzzle out the meaning of a particularly eloquent passage. That was the case with one scene after Cromwell locks up in the Tower one of his friends, the courtier and poet Thomas Wyatt, perhaps the only one suspected of adultery with Anne who was not executed. Although it took me some digging to come up with, I’m sure Mantel already knew the extent of Wyatt’s fame as a brilliant poet and key figure in the history of English literature. That shed some extra light on Cromwell’s thoughts after he locked up Wyatt for protection. Cromwell has just explained to Wriothesley that Wyatt is too sharp and too great a poet to ever let his written words entrap him – even his lines about being smitten by the “wife of Caesar”:
‘If I were Wyatt,’ Call-Me says, ‘I would have made sure no one misconstrued me. I would have stayed away from Caesar’s wife.’
‘That is the wise course.’ He smiles. ‘But it is not for him. It is for people like you and me.’
When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive and be decieved in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. …
Bring Up the Bodies does not suffer in any way the usual fate of a sequel. It is an undiminished part of what will probably be seen as Mantel’s masterwork, this tale of Cromwell. The only difference I see between it and its predecessor is that the author “fixed” something she was criticized for in Wolf Hall, her repeated use of “he” for her protagonist in ways that some found confusing. It is true, one did occasionally have to stop to figure out which “he” she meant, but it always quickly became clear with but a little thought. In this book, though, she occasionally employs the construction “he, Cromwell.” I found it to be jarring and more interruptive of the narrative’s flow than the sometimes-puzzling simple pronoun.
Mantel’s choice of a limited omnicient third-person in present tense continues to serve the story well. We see the action and all the other characters through Cromwell’s eyes, but without the risks that come with a first-person narrative. It serves as a de-facto first-person narrative, because we see and hear only what Cromwell sees and hears, with others’ actions constantly filtered through his consciousness. But we don’t get the sense of self-serving or fictionalizing that would come with a constant “I, I, I.” Oh, and in this book we get a good bit more of Cromwell’s back story, but never in clumsy exposition, only when he is reflecting on some action that he just took or is planning. Mantel deftly allows us to continue to like this Cromwell, who can one moment contemplate the death of a rival and the next, consider with fondness his son’s predilection for sweets.
A final thought. Even great authors sometimes fail to end a book well. Coming up with a suitable denoument can be especially difficult following a climax as long-anticipated and as horrifically bloody as the one in this tale. This author passes that test with ease, briefly reinvigorating the story and the reader with a dash of the wit and droll English “stiff-upper-lip” philosophy that inform Cromwell’s worldview. Bring Up the Bodies is another great book by Hilary Mantel.
Here’s a reading of an early scene in this book, in which the principals discuss the portraiture of Hans Holbein (listen for an example of the use of “he, Cromwell…”):
(Fourth Estate U.K., Henry Holt U.S., 2012)
