Illuminating, demanding her majestic Tudor trilogy
bling 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 a 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. A colon is correctly placed: if Mantel says it is.
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 nit-picking 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 and 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 which 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 pudding, and a queen is dead. The rewards are unrivalled: it is a book not read, but 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 often shoved a rung or two down the literary ladder by critics requiring “urgency”, 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: start your Brexit novel this afternoon, and by the time it has been taken down from the shelves of the library its characters and causes have acquired a layer of dust.
So The Mirror and the Light is not about the past; it is not about the Lincolnshire Pilgrimage of Grace, or Anne of Cleves’s failure to engage her husband’s ardour: it is about the present. It is about the miasma of power and insecurity that hangs in the air of Whitehall now, as ever; about how the character and direction of a nation is dictated not by policy, but by ministers and advisers as vulnerable, venal and anxious as the electorate.
And what of the end? Absurd to observe the niceties, and issue a spoiler alert: we all know Cromwell’s neck will be bared for the axe. In fact, it is perhaps the clearest indicator of this novel’s superb indifference to the conventional demands of narrative that its chief propulsion comes not from a mystery withheld until its final chapter, but from a certainty towards which the reader helplessly moves. The question is not “will Cromwell keep his life?” but
“will Cromwell keep his head?”, which is quite a different thing.
As to that, I can only say that on closing the book I wept as
I’ve not wept over a novel since I was a child not yet inured to fiction’s cunning, and recall with some embarrassment declaring to an empty room: “Oh Cromwell, Cromwell — your lovely house! And your apple trees!”
This is not, though, the abiding impression left on the psyche by this book, and its predecessors. I think of Cromwell, as I first met him, with nothing in his bank account but the glittering store of his wits; I think of his thumping the breast of the king, to revive him from a fall; I think of his level gaze meeting that of Anne Boleyn as she dips her white hands in her sleeves… and these memories do not seem to occupy a separate chamber of my mind from that in which memories of dead friends and relations are stored.
When King Henry bows, his diamonds scatter rainbows on the floor.
So what endures is not sorrow, but illumination: Mantel struck her spark against the flint of Thomas Cromwell, and — to purloin Hugh Latimer’s phrase — lit such a candle in England as will never go out.
Telegraph
Sarah Perry has had three novels published, the latest of which is 2018’s Melmoth