What to read

The devil is in the detail

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel. HarperCollins Publishers, $39.99. Reviewed by Robbie Millen.

Hilary Mantel is a forceful woman. She knows how to grab readers by the scruff of the neck and hurl them deep into her imagination and far into the past. The opening pages of all three of her novels about Thomas Cromwell are spectacularly violent: rude introductions to the brutal, bloody world of Tudor England.

In this final part of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, we start in May 1536 with the beheading of Anne Boleyn: ‘‘The small body lies on the scaffold where it has fallen: belly down, hands outstretched, it swims in a pool of crimson, the blood seeping between the planks.’’

Before you have reached the end of the page, you are thrust into Mantel’s Tudor universe. For those of you who have travelled there before, it will feel like home.

This volume, released this week, covers the years 1536 to 1540. It is the time of Cromwell’s pomp, then sudden fall. As Mantel puts it: ‘‘Though he is a commoner still, most would agree that he is the second man in England.’’ Cromwell has seen off his greatest rivals, men such as Thomas More and Bishop Stephen Gardiner. He’s master secretary, lord privy seal, master of the rolls and chancellor of the exchequer. Later, he leaves behind the commoners to become a lord of the realm.

However, ‘‘his chief duty (it seems just now) is to get the king new wives and dispose of the old’’. A tough job, especially because Henry has a whim of iron. It is Cromwell’s failure to do this that leads to the executioner’s scaffold in 1540.

The greatest strength of the Wolf Hall trilogy is how Mantel makes Tudor history feel so pungent and vivid. In particular, to upend the 1960s slogan, she shows with skill how the political was personal in 16th-century England.

During the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion, the king is keen to don his armour and display himself as a show of strength to his disobedient people. Nowhere is the political/personal theme more important, though, than the matter of begetting a legitimate, male heir to ensure the stability of the state.

Yet her historical understanding is worn lightly. Mantel mines the comic potential of the personal-political, especially in the chapters dealing with Henry’s failed marriage to Anne of Cleves (‘‘this unholy, unsanctified misalliance’’, Henry says). The king is mightily displeased by her looks: he unfavourably compares her sallow complexion to the lovely dead Jane Seymour (‘‘When I think of Jane, so white and clear, a pearl’’); he dislikes her ‘‘great outlandish bonnet’’, her height (‘‘I think she must wear raised soles’’); worst of all, she has ‘‘displeasant airs’’. The king’s physician suggests to Cromwell: ‘‘You might talk to her chamberwoman. See if they are washing her well enough.’’

The flashes of lightness do not diminish the seriousness of the historical research. There are some fascinating nuggets of information: one reason Cromwell was keen for this dynastic match was because the dukedom of Cleves-MarkJulich-Berg had reserves of alum, a substance ‘‘without which we cannot dye cloth’’.

However, this volume, at 875 pages, is longer than the two that went before (650 and 482 pages respectively). Like Henry VIII, bloat has set in. William Faulkner’s advice for writers was: ‘‘You must kill all your darlings.’’ A lot of Mantel’s darlings have not had the Boleyn treatment. Detail accumulates, joining forces with digressions to slow the story’s pace to snail speed.

All extraneous. And yet I’m glad she kept it in. It’s the sort of detail you turn over in your mind.