Bring Up The Bodies

by Hilary Mantel, 2012 (March 2015)

Bring Up The Bodies was, for me, less interesting than Wolf Hall. What I liked in Wolf Hall was Mantel’s detailed picture of life and politics in an England changing from a medieval world to a modern one. It illuminated themes that are still relevant, such as the relationship between the individual and the state (in the person of the ruler), religion, science and economy. Most of these are shifted far to the background in Bring Up The Bodies, or absent entirely.

  What we do have is the story of how a ruthless political operative manipulates the machinery of the state for the benefit of his faction, as well as for reasons of personal satisfaction and profit. This of course remains a current theme and there is some interest in seeing exactly how Thomas Cromwell played the power game in the Tudor court (at least as Mantel sees it). But I find I am less interested in the grimy details of who lied to whom, or how a succession of victims is coerced to acquiesce in their own trials. Wolf Hall had a broader context that made for more interesting reading. Thinking of it now, it seems to illustrate the Stalinist purges and the show trials of the 1930s more than contemporary political manipulation (although no doubt there are contemporary parallels).

  It is interesting perhaps that Cromwell struggles so single-mindedly to amass power and wealth at the top of the political pyramid in a world that despised him for his common origins. He thinks frequently about how to protect himself should his political fortunes shift, and how to ensure his son a secure place when he is no longer there to arrange things for his son. (And his son does not seem to have the same strength of character of his father, although it seems that he survived to establish his own aristocratic line.) Yet we know that his predecessor and mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, ended up in the Tower, that the historical Cromwell was also arrested and executed. Mantel opens the book with a dream of Cromwell’s children falling from the sky, an image that recurs from time to time. In spite of this rather poignant perspective, though, Cromwell remains an unappealing character. And it is telling that his only friendly relationships seem to be with the foreign ambassadors whose ambitions he wants to block.

  In Wolf Hall, Cromwell was a more sympathetic figure as a man of science and reason, particularly as opposed to the fanatical Thomas More. Here, although Mantel uses personal details to reflect on Cromwell’s loss of his wife and daughter, or his hopes for his son, there is very little to make him likeable, particularly when he is so blatant in his personal and political scheming. And Mantel’s style of writing in the present tense with a third person pronoun, although it implies a very personal point of view, is rather distancing since a reader has to pay careful attention to keep track of who the pronouns refer to. Mantel’s rich and poetic descriptive detail does help to bring a reader into the time and place, but this time it was not enough to overcome the limited perspective.

  It appears that Mantel wants to create an iconoclastic portrait, a counter to the usual heroic focus on Henry and More. In this, I think she succeeds. No one who reads her books on Cromwell can think of Henry’s rule without being strongly influenced by the shape she puts on it. She creates a strong and detailed portrait of a dramatic figure from history, which perhaps justifies the awards she has won. It’s just disappointing that the portrait in this volume is not more engaging.