Truth is often inconvenient and incoherent. The whole fascination and the skill is in working with those inconsistencies.
Author Hilary Mantel on writing historical fiction
The Mirror & the Light Hilary Mantel Harpercollins SARAH PERRY
Thomas Cromwell — son of a Putney blacksmith; brawler, fixer and merchant; a man whose opinions on apple cultivation are as trenchant as those on the English Bible — is in the ascendant. The Mirror & the Light, which concludes Hilary Mantel’s majestic Wolf Hall trilogy, begins as the second novel, Bring Up the Bodies, ends: with Anne Boleyn’s head on the block.
Cromwell, whose machinations did much to bring about the severance of head from body, queen from king and England from Rome, remembers to thank the executioner: “It is important to reward good service with encouragement, as well as a purse.”
So the reader returns to the Tudor court, and the novel’s immediate pleasure is that of arriving at a familiar place and greeting familiar faces: There’s that sap Mark Smeaton fiddling with his lute; and would you look at little Jane Seymour, with her small white hands! Here’s Stephen Gardiner, going out as he is coming in — cunning as vipers, slippery as eels; here too are the Reformers Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, already with the faintest whiff of burning martyr rising from the folds of their coats. The king grows stout. His gilded hair fades; his ardent eye, so fatally married to princely ambition and a malleable faith, does not.
And in every corner, at every table: the inevitable Cromwell, whose consciousness the reader inhabits — the king ’s right hand, and his right foot also. He plays both ends against His Majesty’s middle: A morning with Margaret Pole, behind whose “long Plantagenet face” ticks scheming for the throne; an afternoon with Archbishop Cranmer, and his Lutheran tendencies. Wider still and wider shall his bounds be set: He is Lord Privy Seal, he is the first Earl of Essex, he could follow you into a revolving door, and come out in front. Still — what goes up must come down, and “the king never made a man but he destroyed him again.”
The Mirror & the Light is so closely joined to its antecedents you cannot see the seam — but I found the faintest alteration in the treatment of Cromwell. It is not a question of sentimentality, but rather a deepening of his humanity, extending him still further in the direction of both virtue and villainy. When Cromwell makes fumbling approaches toward a kind of intimacy, our sympathies are drawn tenderly out — then he visits a prisoner in the Tower, and calls for a mallet.
In one spectacular coup de grace, Mantel flings a narrative loop back to the opening words of Wolf Hall — “So now get up!” — and the effect is of coming across a new room in a house which we thought we knew well.
Mantel’s style remains exhilarating: It is a conflation of expansiveness and precision, refined across her career, which has no peer. The hoary old gods of prose still haunting the shelves from their 20th-century deathbeds (be taut and spare as a fishing line! suffer hanging for an adverb!) are kicked down a flight of stairs. Her sentences, not markedly long, nonetheless contain multitudes. The reader’s senses are deliciously engaged (the painter Holbein, for example, “trails with him the scents of his occupation, the scents of linseed and lavender oil, pine-resin and rabbit-skin glue”). And in all this her sharp and mordant wit makes itself felt like pins stuck in a yard of velvet.
Some historians, diligently keeping their gates, have been inclined to cavil at her handling of history: “A deliberate perversion,” sniffed David Starkey. Well, who cares? “Truth is often inconvenient and incoherent,” said Mantel. “The whole fascination and the skill is in working with those inconsistencies.”
An especially punctilious reader may, I suppose, wonder whether Henry really took a tumble jousting in the lists, but where would such nitpicking end — must documents be summoned to prove that the king’s daughter had a cushion with a mermaid stitched on it?
The novelist’s duty is to the construction of a world that does not leak, and the world of Wolf Hall is as sealed as an egg. To read The Mirror & the Light, as I did, hard on the heels of the first two novels in the trilogy, is to achieve a state of mind in which one idly wonders, while selecting bananas from the supermarket, if the plague will arrive this summer.
The book is both too long, and precisely as long as it needs to be. Which is to say that I suppose it might have been cut, if one remained in thrall to the rather quaint idea that a good novel is one that has all fat trimmed, and never mind if that trims off the flavour. The existing cast, already immense, grows exponentially, testing both memory and patience — turn the page and five fresh courtiers bustle anxiously in.
It is a demanding novel, assuming intelligence and deep engagement in its readers, and failure to meet the assumption is fatal. Allow the mind to wander to possibilities for supper, and a member of Parliament has been shot in the street.
Wander as far as dessert, and a queen is dead. The rewards are unrivalled — it is a book not read, but to be lived. With its sensual appeal, its digressions of memory and its total immersion in the consciousness of its principal character, it calls to mind not other exemplars of historical fiction, but Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
It is not, in fact, especially pertinent that this is a work of historical fiction, a genre that critics requiring “urgency” often shove a rung or two down a wholly imaginary literary ladder, as if novels were not entertainments but appendectomies. As if Middlemarch, for example, were not a historical novel. In effect all fiction is historical fiction — commence your Brexit novel this afternoon, and by the time it has been taken down from the shelves of the local library its characters and causes have acquired a layer of dust.
Mantel’s style remains exhilarating: It is a conflation of expansiveness and precision, refined across her career, which has no peer.