The Mirror and the Light (2020)
907pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-09-20
I’m 3/4 of the way through the final installment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell books, I’m finding this one more of a slog than the last two which I sailed through – I considered giving up after about 2/300 pages, glad I didn’t.
after finishing
In most ways that matter, the final part of Hilary Mantel’s correctly lauded Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is more of the same. Possibly too much more of the same? It’s 900ish pages. The wonderfully conjured Tudor world is just as believable, strange and familiar as in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. The language is as poetic and the characters machinations are as twisting and vaporous.
In this one Mantel brings questions of England’s relationship to Europe to the fore and there’s even a nod to “cancel culture” in the closing section of the book …
Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer.
This is part of the wonder of these books for me, they speak to the contemporary without ever nodding or winking at the reader, the fourth wall is always intact. The fiction is complete, solid, and believable without ever filling in all gaps and depriving the reader the chance to use their imagination to bring things to life.
Another thing I like: The way the plots and subterfuges work in these books; they hide themselves from the reader until its too late, Cromwell makes tiny moves, apparently unrelated until the trap snaps shut and you, the reader, see how the whole thing has been inevitable for the last 100, 200 or so pages. Of course at the end of this one Cromwell is the subject of the plotting rather than the plotter.
What this volume does lack is the velocity of the earlier books; this is a more reflective Cromwell, lost more often in memory, in self congratulation, and in trying to make sense of his own story; his eye is more often not on the ball. This makes the earlier sections a bit of a slog (though Mantel has divied the book up into 6 parts each of which has a definite arc so that helps).
So anyway, do I recommend it? I mean if you’ve read the first two you probably already know you’ll want to read this one. If not then there’s no point starting with this one.