Knowing Cromwell’s fate before it comes to pass, the reader might at several points think ‘this is going to be it’, only for things to continue on.
The bulk is somewhat justified: the shift in Henry and Cromwell’s relationship is all the more affecting for being gradual. At almost nine hundred pages, it labours under the weight of its material. “Cromwell, is that in the scriptures?”’ And Cromwell imagines Henry figuring himself as God’s publicist and hype man: ‘the way he’s set him up, got his big book translated, made him the common talk.’įor all its virtues, though, The Mirror and the Light is a notably flawed novel, inferior to its predecessors. Henry’s councillors panic when Bishop Sampson suggests that all sex is sinful: ‘“Even with their wives?” Suffolk looks stricken … “Bollocks,” Norfolk says. This perhaps makes it all sound rather serious, which it is, but Mantel can be very funny too and a wry humour simmers throughout.
Cromwell emerges like one of the spirits in the mystical visions he is prone to (accounts of which provide some of the novel’s most beautiful and haunting passages).
Somehow he seems both the most realised of characters and an enigma. Mantel, however, has opened Cromwell to us through subtler means. Typically anti-heroes depend on first-person intimacy and linguistic gusto to pull us along: think of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Humbert Humbert in Lolita or John Self in Money. It is testament to Mantel’s powers that Cromwell, who, we are reminded, has killed (directly and indirectly) many innocent people, has become something of a sympathetic character. The slipperiness of truth, for so long Thomas’s greatest weapon, has now become his foe. But it is this novel’s closing sequence that forms the trilogy’s most stunning achievement, as the full force of the state machinery Thomas has engineered is brought to bear against him and, as we always knew would happen, he goes to the executioner’s block. Here Cromwell finds himself constrained by an increasingly volatile reality: rebel armies are rising against the king, France and Spain are conspiring, and Henry is dissatisfied with Cromwell’s choice of Anne of Cleves as his new queen. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies captured this too, of course, but it is felt more powerfully now because the victim of fake news and alternative facts is none other than Thomas Cromwell himself. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the Light, the third and final instalment in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy. I t is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era.
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