At some point, isn't the future just more of the past, except that now you recognize the oncoming disasters you can do nothing about?)Ĭritics have pointed out that Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies are so anchored in their time by virtue of our narrator and the carefully-detailed world that they resist easy mapping over the present Mantel didn't set out primarily to draw a line between the past and now. The momentum of Bring Up the Bodies gives way here to something heavier and darker, slow but no less effective for it. And on the other side of time, Katherine Howard darts around every corner, a future immediately apparent to Cromwell, her family, and the entire English court. Now, The Mirror & the Light picks up promptly where the last left off, offering Cromwell's ascent during the days of Jane Seymour, and - briefly - Anne of Cleves.īut really, what The Mirror & the Light offers is Anne Boleyn here, and Queen Katherine there, and Jane Seymour everywhere, as Cromwell finds it impossible to forget what he's left behind on the climb. Its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, centered around the downfall of Queen Anne. Wolf Hall was largely concerned with Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Cromwell, who orchestrated quite a bit of legislation and statecraft in the years he was close to King Henry, was an instrumental figure in arranging or dissolving the King's first four marriages in these novels time is not marked by seasons so much as it is by queens.
In Wolf Hall, the first of Hilary Mantel's Booker-Prize winning Cromwell trilogy, Mantel approached history sidelong, focusing keenly on a figure of no great public sympathy. Of course, the thing about houses close to rivers - or to kings - is that it only takes one tempest to remind you not everything holds.
As if to spite the landed nobles who look down on him, he builds his own walled estate in the heart of the city, as near to the source of his power as he can get. He's spent two books laying foundations both metaphorical and literal, and as his star rises under King Henry VIII, his London house - Austin Friars, close to the Thames - expands practically to a castle keep. How?Īt the start of The Mirror & The Light, Thomas Cromwell is a man very much at home.
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