Hilary Mantel sees Tudor bruiser run out of luck: ANTHONY CUMMINS reviews The Mirror & the Light 

The Mirror & the Light

By Hilary Mantel

Rating:

Readers of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling novels of Tudor history, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have long awaited this third and final instalment.

But it wasn’t known when precisely it would arrive until a clever guerrilla advertising campaign last autumn.

A single billboard briefly displayed in London’s Leicester Square with nothing but a teasing phrase – ‘So now get up’ which fans instantly recognised as the opening words of Wolf Hall – and a date, March 5 2020.

Cue frenzy in the British literary world, not least among publishers frantically rearranging schedules to duck out of going head to head with the most hotly awaited novel of the year, if not the century. 

The Mirror & the Light is the final part of Mantel’s slantwise take on the sorry saga of Henry VIII and his six wives, who are bit-part players in a narrative that focuses on the extraordinary rags-to-riches rise of perhaps the greatest, most complex character in 21st century fiction, Henry’s self-made lieutenant Thomas Cromwell.

He’s a suave bruiser tasked with ensuring Henry stays strictly within the law during his serially marriage-breaking quest for a legitimate male heir.

Wolf Hall, published in 2009, was a coming-of-age narrative set from 1500 to 1535 in which Cromwell escapes his troubled boyhood as a blacksmith’s son to become English politics’s No 1 string-puller. 

It sold like hot cakes and won the Booker Prize.

Mantel, 67, won it again with the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Set between 1535 and 1536, it sees Cromwell at the height of his powers use Henry’s to-and-fro over his continued lack of a son as a pretext for settling personal scores.

But in The Mirror & the Light, which charts Cromwell’s final four years, it is downhill for Henry’s Master Secretary.

This is by far the most dense of the three books, with courtly politicking and paranoia as Cromwell runs out of luck.

The real beauty of these novels has always been the heady sense that Mantel is ushering us behind the curtain to glimpse the dark workings of power and statecraft in a secret history of England.

Mantel’s voice, dryly comic with a bawdy streak, is earthy yet elegant, free of ye olde cod historicisms, cleanly modern without being anachronistic.

While these novels are fundamentally bound up with women’s bodies, Mantel’s focus is almost exclusively male. Against the prevailing trend of modern literary fiction, she is not focusing on silenced voices but on a historical figure whose job was to avoid becoming the story.

That Cromwell couldn’t manage this makes for an unexpectedly pole-axing conclusion, which after nearly 2,000 pages in his deliciously scheming company feels almost like a bereavement.

Still, it’s hard not to sense in The Mirror & the Light that much of the story’s most dramatic material is behind us.

There isn’t a scene to match, say, the squirming tension of the climactic courtroom drama in Bring Up the Bodies, and it’s perhaps a sign that Mantel is editorially untouchable that the new instalment approaches the length of the two previous doorstoppers put together.

In an afterword to her previous book, Mantel, pictured, said she cut material from the historical record for the sake of a sleeker read. At the risk of treason, could that have been done here?

While there is not an ounce of fat on the prose, the journey from Jane Seymour to Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves – the moment Cromwell oversteps the mark – can feel a little dutiful.

Even the most insatiable Tudor junkie might be forgiven a drooping eyelid.

For sure, it’s the capstone on an amazing feat of sustained achievement, but The Mirror & the Light could break the hearts of ardent Mantelites by not quite living up to the nigh-on impossibly high standards she set with the last two.

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel is published by Fourth Estate on March 5, £25.