Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, Book 2)

I've seldom seen anything similar to the approving furor over Hilary Mantel's WOLF HALL, and if you had told me that a novel about Thomas Cromwell - most famously seen as a sleazy weasel attacking the saintly Thomas More in the movie A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS - could be fascinating and sexy, I would not have believed you. Mantel's writing, however, was utterly perfect as she twisted expectations by showing More as the intolerant, egocentric, venomous 16th-century anti-hero and Cromwell as a man who, in spite of battering, had become generous, loving, wise, reforming, amusing - calculating and vengeful (the vengeful doesn't really pop up until almost the end of WOLF HALL but it's definitely a trail worth following). So where do you go with one of the decade's most approved books, winner of the Man Booker Prize and other prestigious awards, which was so beautifully written that, while waiting for Part 2, many of us read it multiple times just to savor the ironies, the contrasts? You go on, as life does, and do Part 2. BRING UP THE BODIES gives Cromwell an altogether tougher task. Having become rich and elevated by serving Henry VIII in any way he desires, Cromwell now has to metaphorically enter Henry's bed to get rid of an inconvenient woman. Anne Boleyn has failed to give the King what she promised and that, in Tudor England, was fatal. The current Queen, from the first page of the book, has a metaphysical and literal sword hanging over her head. After the most notorious romance in western history, a stitched-up divorce ripping England from Holy Mother Church, all she can provide to the heir-hungry Henry is - another squalling daughter and a series of miscarriages. Just like her predecessor, the sorrowful Katherine of Aragon. So - Cromwell, the ultimate Fixer for his Machiavellian monarch, is going to have to fix this one as well. At what cost? As the book progressed, an image from the first page kept recurring to me - the falcon, stooping to the kill, bloodied and remorseless. Circa regna tonat , indeed. This story has been told and retold, and the same magic that infused Wolf Hall illuminates this catastrophic event with the same surprises, beautiful writing, subtle penetration, and black irony. Somehow, it seems like an entirely new story, one in which you know there will be bodies but still, for a time, it seems like this doom-laden tale could be rewritten, that it will not end in a stage full of corpses. There is magic in Mantel's prose: "Katherine was not without sin, but now her sins are taken off her. They are all heaped upon Anne; the shadow who flits after her, the woman draped in night. The old queen dwells in the radiance of God's presence, her dead infants swaddled at her feet, but Anne dwells in this sinful world below, stewed in her childbed sweat, in her soiled sheet. But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone." I waited two years for this book and it was worth the wait. If Mantel can sustain this dark, haunted, illuminating, ironic time-travel for a third book, I will be astounded - but perhaps, not surprised.

Hilary Mantel writes like a dream and invests in Tudor-court politics an essential believability that speaks brilliantly to her powers of imagination. She might have been a fly on the wall in actual conversations she has spun between Cromwell and Henry - exchanges that mix quotidian events of the pantry with events of great pitch and moment on the Continent - or, more magically, between Cromwell ("Cremuel") and Anne Boleyn, haughty, dismissive, conniving, and insecure for her inability to produce a male heir. This is more a political thriller than simply a historical novel that rehashes one of the most familiar episodes in English history. Yes, we know how this turns out, but we admire the way in which Mantel invests each participant with very specific stakes in particular outcomes and creates a narrative that simply hurtles forward. I miss, however, the dreamy narrative character of the first volume, Wolf Hall, which to my eyes was enhanced by Mantel's use of the third-person singular "he," unmodified, to refer to Cromwell - a trope that mystified many readers who failed to fall into Mantel's particular rhythm. Here, either in deference to readers or editors, she is perfectly clear, repeatedly referring to "he, Cromwell, ... " rather than simply to "he" or "Cromwell," either of which would do the work without the odd stylization. The first volume also covered nearly 50 years of Cromwell's life, was packed widely varied locales and events, sharp observation, a sense of the full panoply of English life in the Tudor, one that breathed naturally and spaciously. Bring Up the Bodies, on the other hand, unfolds in a compressed nine-month timeframe, in the suffocatingly claustrophobic atmosphere of Henry's royal court, thickly populated by credibly wrought historical personages - the only pure creation is Cromwell's entertaining French henchman, Christophe - and all fed by lies, rumor, innuendo, and stiletto dialogue. In this chapter of Mantel's Cromwelliad, Master Secretary comes off significantly less sympathetically - colder, more calculating (if that can even be imagined), and more self-interested (above all in staying afloat) - than in the first novel. His essential humanity, however, repeatedly surfaces, often in the form of an enduring loyalty to the dead Wolsey, Cromwell's beloved sponsor and mentor, and one of two largely absent figures who hovers over the proceedings. The other, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Cromwell's most ardent foe, elicits a different side of Cromwell altogether. Gardiner spends most of this story in France in an ambassadorial capacity but is perfectly apprised of Cromwell's doings and from afar works continually to undermine his designs, just as Cromwell works to contain Gardiner's influence at court and among the friends of Catherine, the first of Henry's deposed queens, who have allied with Cromwell against the Boleyns. Yet for all the delights of Mantel's characterization and dialogue (and speculation about what actually happened, for we shall never know), the story seemed at times somewhat cluttered and discursive. I recognize this perception is almost certainly partly due to my American provincialism in failing to keep distinctions absolutely clear: every principal character except the occasional commoner has at least three, and often more, ways to be named - "Thomas Howard" (one of many, many "Thomases"), "Howard," "Norfolk," "Lord High Steward" - and, at times, keeping all the personalities straight made my head spin. (Cromwell the butcher's son also has many titles, but we always know where he is, as the novel's point of view is uniformly Cromwellian. Is he in every scene? Without going back to check, I believe so.) Thankfully, Mantel (or the publisher) provides a dramatis personae, to which I often referred. But his is a dismissable carp: this is a wonderful follow-up to Wolf Hall that whets the appetite for a third and final installment of the Cromwell Saga. It cannot come too soon.

Der zweite Teil der Trilogie über Thomas Cromwell schildert vorwiegend den Untergang von Anne Boleyn, der zweiten Frau von Heinrich VIII. und welche Rolle Cromwell dabei spielte. Der Höhepunkt ist die Beschreibung Hilary Mantels auf 10 Seiten von der Hinrichtung Boleyns - der Scharfrichter kam eigens aus Calais. - Des Weiteren lernt mal viel über wichtige Persönlichkeiten des damaligen Englands und Heinrichs VIII. Bruch mit Rom kennen. Die Hinrichtung von Thomas More spiegelt den Höhepunkt diesen Bruchs wider. - Historischer, epischer Roman at its best!

Es fantástico, quizá el primero me impresionó más pero este segundo es espectacular también. Los retratos psicológicos y el desarrollo de los acontecimientos estan descritos con una riqueza y precisión que pareces estar en el lugar que la autora describe, percibiendo los estados de ánimo de los personajes, los olores y temperatura de cada secuencia del relato. Hace creer al lector q lo q realmente ocurrió es lo que está leyendo. Recomiendo su lectura y quedo a la espera de la publicación de la tercera entrega de la trilogía.

A autora conferiu profunda dimensão humana a figuras históricas, que tão frequentemente são retratadas de forma estereotipada. Este livro e Wolf Hall, que o antecedeu, são ambos perfeitos tanto para os que amam história, quanto para quem busca boa literatura.

I'm quite knowledgable about the Tudor dynasty (not a scholar of the persiod, I have just read extensively about it over 30 years) and this is the first book that actually gives some understanding of Thomas Cromwell. His major acts, or "machinations", and there consequences have been well documented. But this man was so much more than popular fiction and light histories portray. Hilary Mantel's conversational style takes the reader right into Cromwell's thoughts - and whilst no-one can know another's thoughts, it seems that she has used her extensive research of clearly documented conversations, minutes of meetings etc, to create this inner dialogue. The effect is quite powerful. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, to use a cliché, found it hard to put down! I'd like her to write abut Anne of Cleves next - another under-represented and mis-represented, but major player of the period.

This is a worthy successor to Wolf Hall, and in my opinion, a better novel. The first ends with a marriage; the 2nd with an execution. I much prefer executions to marriages. The intrigue surrounding the elevation of Ann Boleyn and the banishment of Katherine of Arragon from the royal bed, is modest stuff compared with the sexual politics that led to the former losing her head, as well as her crown. Hilary Mantel charts her every false step on the way to the block with intense precision, and a densely textured narrative that skillfully combines clarity and an ambiguity that is essential for an author who attempts to make her fiction match the truth of History. No one can be certain of the absence or extent of Ann’s guilt, and in the context of this novel it is not all that important. It is a foil with which to explore many intriguing issues: the rise of a blacksmith’s son to penultimate power in a court dominated by venal aristocrats busy looking over their shoulders as they stab the back of the courtier in front of them; the brutal clash between Church and State in which the former is stripped of its wealth and the latter of its soul; the initiatives and concessions needed to secure England’s peace with Europe, or a position of unassailable strength through strategic alliances, marriage being the most durable form of diplomatic cement; the gluttonous appetites of newly-promoted families for power and position-------indeed the fall of the Boleyn family is such a satisfying outcome that it almost justifies Anne’s demise for that reason alone. Every good novel needs a hero, and in Thomas Cromwell, Mantel has found or created one to suit her purpose admirably. As a devoted husband, now widower; an exemplary father who has lost all but one of his children, and whose own childhood was marred by paternal cruelty and brutality; a loyal disciple of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who displays equal loyalty and concern for the disciples whose mentor he has now become; he stands as a beacon of common decency in a world of deceit. Mantel paints him, in biblical terms, as a “Noah in his Generation”: no big compliment in being the best of a generation so evil, that God decided to eradicate human life from the planet he had created only a short time ago. Actually, it is not quite like that. As with the very best novelists, Mantel creates or recruits characters who mix good and evil in varying proportions into different shades of gray. Thomas’ father Walter is about as monochromatic as she will allow in her cast of thousands, apart from whom there is no other that lacks some likable features. Her writing is scholarly; at times pedantic; at others mellifluous to the point of daring the reader to recite it rather than read it so that its sonority will not go unappreciated; but she is not shy about words, ideas, or actions that 50 years ago would have raised the hackles of the censors. The enormity of the number of characters places a great strain on the reader’s memory, but the task is made easier by a sort of Cast List that precedes the opening of the novel, and also by the fact that we have met most of them before in Wolf Hall. In fact it is pretty senseless to tackle this one prior to the latter, any more than one can start a Play in the 2nd Act. There will after all be a 3rd to follow, that apparently is already written. As in WH, the production standards of this paperback version are very satisfactory: thick paper, clear medium-sized print, and reasonably durable covers. At Amazon’s price, averaging out around 3 cents per page, this is not only great literature: it is also great economics.