I just didn’t need as much of it as Mantel provided. It felt real a bit messy and self-justifying. It was satisfying to see such a nuanced and complex development of character. The Dead Against the Living: On Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light | Maya Chhabra | LA Review of Books | 9 April 2020 Cromwell is no longer just the living future fighting free of the dead past, but part of that past himself. The LA Review of Books explains that this remembering, revising, reinterpreting processĬomplicates the first two books.

However, I didn’t need to see Cromwell go over and over these times. With greater distance and time between the events of the past, it can be easier to finally acknowledge what really happened or accept our part in what happened. Unnecessarily so, I thought.Īfter the first couple of flashbacks, I understood that Mantel wanted us to see how Cromwell’s views about his childhood and early adult years changed and evolved as he matured. We get LOTS of Cromwell remembering his childhood in Putney and his time in Italy. Everything moves at a snail’s pace as it feels like Mantel crammed in every single thought and idea she has ever had about Cromwell into this chunkster of a book. It could be said that he was suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome.īut then the action slows right down. Last conversations, decisions made when and by whom, their last moments on the scaffold. He goes over and over the conniving and plotting in the days leading up to their deaths.

The story is bookended by bloody deaths.įor the first third of the book, Cromwell is haunted by his involvement in Anne Boleyn’s death and the five men who went down with her. Now everything falls away, the pain, the doubt and the jaundiced fear that has shadowed Henry this last.Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away.ĭidn’t Anne die in the previous book? And didn’t we deal with the time immediately after her death already? Is this opening line a signal that a big recap is coming?Īs it turns out The Mirror and the Light is an overlong meander to Cromwell’s own meeting with the executioner. The project of The Mirror and the Light is to 'speak truth at a beheading,' but with an awareness that truth is complex, fugitive, and dangerous.

But it also raises questions about what it means to 'speak truth,' especially at a beheading, when at least one party is no longer available to speak that truth. The moment foreshadows one of the book's big conflicts-between the low-born Cromwell and the noblemen who surround him-and Cromwell's own end. In this moment, just after Anne Boleyn's execution, Cromwell has just been uncharacteristically blunt with Suffolk, who has refused to kneel for the beheading. Importance: This striking line gestures to a number of major themes in The Mirror and the Light. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, where can you speak it?

The mirror and the light book