Mantel’s miracle: an appreciation

Set in the court of English Tudor King Henry VIII in the years 1527-40 and dissecting the rise and fall of the royal advisor Thomas Cromwell, English novelist Hilary Mantel’s trilogy – ‘Wolf Hall’ (2009), ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ (2012) and ‘The Mirror and the Light’ (2020) – constitutes the finest fiction published in the English-language this century.

The overarching achievement of the Cromwell trilogy is to make the distant past as lived present for the reader. “The three Cromwell novels are so urgent with seen, heard and felt life,” wrote one critic, “that attaching the word ‘historical’ to her work seems unnecessary”.

Mantel has delivered on Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new!” while adhering scrupulously to the historical record. Life in England five centuries ago jumps off the page, with all its minutiae: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, gestures, atmosphere, even weather.

Mantel’s art is profound; as the Russian saying goes, she lies like an eye-witness. The books are written in the present tense, and we see the past, the present and the future as they appear to Thomas Cromwell – contingent and uncertain.

Just as contingently as I got to the Cromwell books. I picked up ‘Wolf Hall’ when it won the most prestigious award for fiction in the United Kingdom, the Booker prize, in 2009; but lost interest after the first few pages.

Mantel’s second Booker prize three years later forced me to take a second look. A novelist winning the Booker prize twice is rare but not unheard of. To win it for consecutive books and for consecutive parts of a single trilogy was and remains unique.

I began reading ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ to probe the miracle of a novel set in the years 1535-36 and narrating how, to free the English King Henry VIII from his marriage to Anne Boleyn, his adviser Thomas Cromwell manipulates and coerces on his way to Anne’s beheading.

‘Bring Up the Bodies’ was published in the fourth year of my first term in the National Assembly. By 2012, I had observed and assessed enough on the floor of parliament, in committee rooms, in party conclaves, and in meetings of the government of Punjab to make the conclusion plain: Mantel had plumbed the abyss of power.

‘Wolf Hall’, which I devoured immediately afterwards, revealed the breadth of Mantel’s achievement. It too was a meditation on power, but it encompassed, to give just a limited list: diplomacy, class-conflict, the omnipresence of death and, not least, Christianity’s Reformation and the role of Henry VIII’s need for a legitimate male heir in the formation of the Church of England.

Eight years after the second installment, the trilogy concluded last month with publication of ‘The Mirror and the Light’. The weight of heightened expectation was compounded by the foreknowledge of Cromwell’s fate for 480 years. Mantel’s challenge was thus formidable. She has prevailed with consummate form.

Remarkably, the first entry in the seven-page long cast of characters in ‘The Mirror and the Light’ is “The Recently Dead.” Death suffuses the trilogy, whether by pestilence – precursors of the coronavirus – or by heads being chopped off. Most of the killing happens off the page. Yet Mantel informs us unstintingly that a severed head is “heavier than you think.”

Each book of the trilogy ends with an execution. ‘Wolf Hall’ concludes with the beheading of Cromwell’s rival Thomas More. Anne Boleyn’s rolling head ends ‘Bring Up the Bodies’. The three books close with bravura pages describing the death of the protagonist: “The pain is acute, a raw stinging, a ripping, a throb. He can taste his death: slow, metallic, not come yet… it seems a long time ago now since he gave his permission to be dead; no one has told his heart, and he feels it writhe in his chest, trying to beat.”

‘The Mirror and the Light’ retains the propulsive energy, vivacious detail, and deep insight of the previous books. What is new is the more contemplative Cromwell, whose thoughts, dreams, and hallucinations we share. The weight and sins of his past accrete as he ages; just as his hubris increases as he scrambles up to dizzy heights on the greasy pole of power.

The forensic examination of political power in the Cromwell trilogy is unmatched in English-language fiction of recent decades. The sole comparable novel was translated from the Spanish, ‘The Feast of the Goat’ by Mario Vargas Llosa. The only true peer to Mantel’s trilogy can be found only in non-fiction: Robert Caro’s nonpareil, multi-volume biography of the 36th US president, ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’.

Hilary Mantel has gazed deep into the abyss of political power and, as Nietzsche predicted, the abyss has gazed back. A substantial anthology of insights and aphorisms can be distilled from the trilogy. Here Cromwell ruminates on the motivations for power:

“We rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins, and we think ... whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand for me to conquer? Or we at least think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?”

Cromwell observes of his king: “Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of prince…The king is like the shrike or the butcher bird, who sings in imitation of a harmless seed-eater to lure his prey, then impales it on a thorn and digests it at his leisure.”

Cromwell’s downfall occurs principally due to the king’s aversion to the third successive bride Cromwell has arranged for him. Yet, when fortune or the king turns away, causes abound. “Our rulers count up our derelictions,” Cromwell tells another Councilor, “They may say nothing but they keep a secret book.”

Cromwell is undone by the salacious rumours generated by his insistent empathy for the king’s estranged daughter, as well as by the inexplicable apathy that prevents him from crushing his mortal enemy when he has the opportunity.

In the blackest irony, Thomas Cromwell – ruthless prosecutor, torturer, and executioner of a vast unknown number of the king’s enemies – loses his head because he, Cromwell, is not ruthless and amoral enough.

Amidst his rise to power from a commoner to the king’s vice-regent, this complex, religiously progressive, and extraordinary striver sat for an oil portrait by the German painter Hans Holbein. This painting now hangs in the Frick Collection, New York.

Visitors to the Frick’s Living Hall stop usually to see a fine portrait hanging on the left side of the fireplace, of Cromwell’s arch-rival Thomas More; also painted by Hans Holbein. It is a testament to Hilary Mantel’s artistry that, henceforth, many more visitors to the Frick will stop to contemplate the portrait hanging on the right side of the fireplace, of one Thomas Cromwell.

[In memory of the lateJahangir Badar]

The writer is a member of theNational Assembly.

Email: pmlnna81@gmail.com

Twitter: @kdastgirkhan