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selenakIn which I finally get around to the sequel to Wolf Hall, which has the virtues of the earlier book while lacking what was my problem with it. The language is gorgeous, so is the psychology, and above all, Mantel manages something so often told as the downfall of Anne Boleyn into a riveting drama in the second part of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
As opposed to the earlier novel, which covers years, this novel only covers a few months, from Henry's falling in love with Jane Seymour to Anne Boleyn's execution, but that's not the only reason it feels faster paced. As opposed to the six years it took for Henry VIII.'s first marriage to be dissolved, the destruction of his second wife, which was, with hindsight, settled the moment she had her second miscarriage, was something as breathlessly chilling as a polit thriller. What makes the well known story feel fresh is, of course, chiefly the perspective from which it's told, which is from Thomas Cromwell, who, as far as the execution was concerned, was the destroyer-in-chief, though Henry of course has the main responsibility.
I noticed in my review of Wolf Hall that my one problem with it that in her effort to write the any Man of All Seasons, Mantel's Thomas More to me felt so over the top villainized that not only did it make him unbelievable as a character to me but it presented problems as to why then her hero, Thomas Cromwell, in one of his last conversations with the man says "I respected you, I respected you all the time" when the novel showed absolutely nothing to respect. By contrast, her Anne Boleyn while also mostly negatively characterized and not yet an antagonist in Wolf Hall was believable; with Anne you were not left in doubt that she has brains in addition to ruthlessness (and we see that in a show, not tell manner), or that she's actually interested in reform beyond the fact it helps her own cause, and that Cromwell along with personal distaste for his ally by necessity also has something a reluctant admiration for her. Bring Up The Bodies, with its focus on Anne's downfall, builds on that. (Oh, and it also illustrates how you can write Anne Boleyn as a flawed character without making her a caricature of a Mean Girl; looking at you, Philippa Gregory.) Bring Up The Bodies' Anne has both malice and courage, and when her doom sets on her, dignity in trial and death, so when Cromwell at one point thinks "he had always respected Anne as a strategist", this time you can believe it.
Of course, Anne is only the antagonist; the hero of the tale remains Cromwell. And here Mantel performs a quite remarkable feat, because she doesn't downplay just what Cromwell does to get his king's will done. Among other things, he invents thought crime, terrorizes the hapless musician Mark Smeaton into a confession that names hundreds as Anne's lovers, including the Pope and Cromwell himself, out of which Cromwell picks the four noblemen he has a personal vendetta towards because of the way they mocked his old patron and ideal father figure, the late Cardinal Wolsey. "He needed guilty men, and so he picked men who were guilty, though not necessarily as charged." He neither knows nor is that interested whether or not they actually had sex with Anne; it's irrelevant to him. (Meanwhile, he helps Anne's old admirer Thomas Wyatt, aka the man most likely to have had sex with her pre-Henry, to escape the axe because Wyatt is his friend and his charge courtesy of Wyatt's father.) Of course, Mantel as stashed the deck somewhat by letting each of the nobles in question in the first part of the book (and of course in the preceding one) act as a snob towards Cromwell (if you make a Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies drinking game, don't inclue "one sip every time someone calls Cromwell a blackmith's son or reminds him he's low born", because that way you'll never finish the books), but during the interrogation scenes themselves they come across as sympathetic and all too similar to every victim ever caught in a show trial.
And yet, Mantel manages to keep the reader convinced that vengeance for Wolsey and credo of "don't get mad, get even" for constant snobbery notwithstanding, Cromwell's main motivation for all of this, in addition to keeping his own head (only for four years longer, Cremuel, as Anne calls him), is the safety of the kingdom. For Cromwell, the turning point at which he decides to go for broke and that Anne has to go is Henry's tournament accident (soon after, Anne miscarried), because before it was clear Henry hadn't died of this it occurs to him that without Henry, at this point, the country will sink into civil war, the Catholics rallying behind Mary, the Boleyn/Howard faction split because both Anne and her uncle the duke of Norfolk would want the regency for Elizabeth. Cromwell's dedication to the country is often contrasted with the greedy grasping factionalism of the various nobles (and the king's selfishness), but the last part also puts a question mark to whether or not that justifies his actions; it's here where I'm, for the first time and unlike with Wolf Hall, I'm reminded of my favourite Mantel novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which deals with the French Revolution in general and Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins in particular. It has an unsympathetic but three dimensional Marie Antoinette, and the clash between historical necessity (royality has to go) and what actually happens (a woman is executed for what she is, not for the actions she's accused of) is stinging even before we get to Jacobin in fighting and the finale in which Danton and Desmoulins die the same death.
Thomas Cromwell, mastermind, is also Thomas Cromwell, grieving widower and dedicated family man. Indeed Cromwell's surviving son and the members of his household are the only harmonious community in the novel, as the Seymours and the Boleyns/Howards are equal in scheming and exploiting their daughters. (Which you can't argue with historically.) Mantel does something interesting with Jane, though, aka the one who died before Henry could get tired of her and after providing an heir, no less. Jane usually comes across as a saint and/or her brother's tool. In this novel, she lets herself be coached by Cromwell and her brothers, too, and is flawlessly mild yet virtuos with the king, but as it turns out, behind her carefully modest manner she's as ambitious as Anne ever was for herself. It's Jane who when the talk among her family and Cromwell is still of Anne ending up in exile or in a convent, is the first to suggest Anne needs to die.
He asks Jane, 'Would you do anything you can, to ruin Anne Boleyn?' His tone implies no reproach; he's just interested.
Jane considers: but only for a moment. 'No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.'
He must study Jane, now, the expression of her downturned face. When Henry courted Anne she looked squarely at the world, her chiln tilted upwards, her shallow-set eyes like pools of darkness against the glow of her skin. But one searching glance is enough for Jane, and then she casts her eyes down. (...) If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.
The woman most interested in bringing Anne down in the novel is however, and here Mantel goes with tradition instead of recent efforts to rehabilitate her, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford her sister-in-law, who loses no opportunity to drop gossippy hints to Cromwell. (Mantel goes with the traditional motivation, too; bad marital treatment by George and jealousy at the closeness of George and Anne.) But Cromwell regularly chats with a lot of the ladies in waiting; one thing that makes him into a master mind is that he is always interested in what people are telling him, no matter how seemingly trivial the subject, and will use it sooner or later. Which gives Mantel the opportunity for a novel in which not a single sex scene takes place but because of all the gossip there is constant talk of sexual intrigue. One karmic irony for Cromwell: after having built his case against Anne on flimsy evidence and innuendo, and seen her executed, he suddenly starts to wonder about his later and hitherto unambigously lamented wife. Was she really always faithful to him? At last, the paranoia he used and fueled catches up with him and he can't get the thought out of his head again, much as he wants to.
Katherine of Aragon has one last scene early in the novel, and here I have to congratulate Mantel again, because even within that one scene her Katherine is tree dimensional, brave but not saintly, which given the situation she's in (close to her deathbed in exile) is hard to avoid, clever, and struck when Cromwell points out to her that if she had agreed to the end of her marriage, Henry would still be a Pope-obeying Catholic.
As mentioned before, the language of the novel is gorgeous, from the opening (in which Cromwell hunts, using falcons named after his dead daughters) onwards: His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.
The description of Anne's execution in the closing pages is harrowing, not least because the reader knows, as Cromwell does not, that he's looking at his own fate. Though we have a trickiness of pronoun again, "he" being sometimes Cromwell, sometimes the executioner, but the passage is so striking, no pun intended, that I'll end with it:
The executioner steps out and he can see - he is very close - Anne's eyes focus on him. The Frenchman bobs to his kneeds to ask pardon. It is a formality and his knees barely graze the straw. He has motioned Anne to kneel, and as she does so he steps away, as if he does not want contact even with her clothes. At arm's lengths, he holds out a folded cloth to one of hte women, and raises a hand to his eyes to show her waht he means. He hopes it is Lady Kingston who takes the blindfold; whoever it is, she is adept, but a small sound cromes from Anne as her world darkens. Her lips move in prayer. The Frenchman waves the women back. They retreat; they kneel, one of them alomst sinks to the ground anda is propped up by teh others; despite the veils one can see their hands, their helpless bare hands, as they draw their own skirts about them, as if they were making themselves small, making themselves safe. The queen is alone now, as alone as she has ever been in he rlife. She says, Christ have mercy, Jesus have mercy, Christ receive my soul. SHe raises one arm, again her fingers go to the coif, and he thinks, put your arm down, for God's sake put your arm down, and he could not will it more if - the executioner calls out sharply, 'Get me the sword.' The blinded head whips around. The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a s harp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.
As opposed to the earlier novel, which covers years, this novel only covers a few months, from Henry's falling in love with Jane Seymour to Anne Boleyn's execution, but that's not the only reason it feels faster paced. As opposed to the six years it took for Henry VIII.'s first marriage to be dissolved, the destruction of his second wife, which was, with hindsight, settled the moment she had her second miscarriage, was something as breathlessly chilling as a polit thriller. What makes the well known story feel fresh is, of course, chiefly the perspective from which it's told, which is from Thomas Cromwell, who, as far as the execution was concerned, was the destroyer-in-chief, though Henry of course has the main responsibility.
I noticed in my review of Wolf Hall that my one problem with it that in her effort to write the any Man of All Seasons, Mantel's Thomas More to me felt so over the top villainized that not only did it make him unbelievable as a character to me but it presented problems as to why then her hero, Thomas Cromwell, in one of his last conversations with the man says "I respected you, I respected you all the time" when the novel showed absolutely nothing to respect. By contrast, her Anne Boleyn while also mostly negatively characterized and not yet an antagonist in Wolf Hall was believable; with Anne you were not left in doubt that she has brains in addition to ruthlessness (and we see that in a show, not tell manner), or that she's actually interested in reform beyond the fact it helps her own cause, and that Cromwell along with personal distaste for his ally by necessity also has something a reluctant admiration for her. Bring Up The Bodies, with its focus on Anne's downfall, builds on that. (Oh, and it also illustrates how you can write Anne Boleyn as a flawed character without making her a caricature of a Mean Girl; looking at you, Philippa Gregory.) Bring Up The Bodies' Anne has both malice and courage, and when her doom sets on her, dignity in trial and death, so when Cromwell at one point thinks "he had always respected Anne as a strategist", this time you can believe it.
Of course, Anne is only the antagonist; the hero of the tale remains Cromwell. And here Mantel performs a quite remarkable feat, because she doesn't downplay just what Cromwell does to get his king's will done. Among other things, he invents thought crime, terrorizes the hapless musician Mark Smeaton into a confession that names hundreds as Anne's lovers, including the Pope and Cromwell himself, out of which Cromwell picks the four noblemen he has a personal vendetta towards because of the way they mocked his old patron and ideal father figure, the late Cardinal Wolsey. "He needed guilty men, and so he picked men who were guilty, though not necessarily as charged." He neither knows nor is that interested whether or not they actually had sex with Anne; it's irrelevant to him. (Meanwhile, he helps Anne's old admirer Thomas Wyatt, aka the man most likely to have had sex with her pre-Henry, to escape the axe because Wyatt is his friend and his charge courtesy of Wyatt's father.) Of course, Mantel as stashed the deck somewhat by letting each of the nobles in question in the first part of the book (and of course in the preceding one) act as a snob towards Cromwell (if you make a Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies drinking game, don't inclue "one sip every time someone calls Cromwell a blackmith's son or reminds him he's low born", because that way you'll never finish the books), but during the interrogation scenes themselves they come across as sympathetic and all too similar to every victim ever caught in a show trial.
And yet, Mantel manages to keep the reader convinced that vengeance for Wolsey and credo of "don't get mad, get even" for constant snobbery notwithstanding, Cromwell's main motivation for all of this, in addition to keeping his own head (only for four years longer, Cremuel, as Anne calls him), is the safety of the kingdom. For Cromwell, the turning point at which he decides to go for broke and that Anne has to go is Henry's tournament accident (soon after, Anne miscarried), because before it was clear Henry hadn't died of this it occurs to him that without Henry, at this point, the country will sink into civil war, the Catholics rallying behind Mary, the Boleyn/Howard faction split because both Anne and her uncle the duke of Norfolk would want the regency for Elizabeth. Cromwell's dedication to the country is often contrasted with the greedy grasping factionalism of the various nobles (and the king's selfishness), but the last part also puts a question mark to whether or not that justifies his actions; it's here where I'm, for the first time and unlike with Wolf Hall, I'm reminded of my favourite Mantel novel, A Place of Greater Safety, which deals with the French Revolution in general and Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins in particular. It has an unsympathetic but three dimensional Marie Antoinette, and the clash between historical necessity (royality has to go) and what actually happens (a woman is executed for what she is, not for the actions she's accused of) is stinging even before we get to Jacobin in fighting and the finale in which Danton and Desmoulins die the same death.
Thomas Cromwell, mastermind, is also Thomas Cromwell, grieving widower and dedicated family man. Indeed Cromwell's surviving son and the members of his household are the only harmonious community in the novel, as the Seymours and the Boleyns/Howards are equal in scheming and exploiting their daughters. (Which you can't argue with historically.) Mantel does something interesting with Jane, though, aka the one who died before Henry could get tired of her and after providing an heir, no less. Jane usually comes across as a saint and/or her brother's tool. In this novel, she lets herself be coached by Cromwell and her brothers, too, and is flawlessly mild yet virtuos with the king, but as it turns out, behind her carefully modest manner she's as ambitious as Anne ever was for herself. It's Jane who when the talk among her family and Cromwell is still of Anne ending up in exile or in a convent, is the first to suggest Anne needs to die.
He asks Jane, 'Would you do anything you can, to ruin Anne Boleyn?' His tone implies no reproach; he's just interested.
Jane considers: but only for a moment. 'No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.'
He must study Jane, now, the expression of her downturned face. When Henry courted Anne she looked squarely at the world, her chiln tilted upwards, her shallow-set eyes like pools of darkness against the glow of her skin. But one searching glance is enough for Jane, and then she casts her eyes down. (...) If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.
The woman most interested in bringing Anne down in the novel is however, and here Mantel goes with tradition instead of recent efforts to rehabilitate her, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford her sister-in-law, who loses no opportunity to drop gossippy hints to Cromwell. (Mantel goes with the traditional motivation, too; bad marital treatment by George and jealousy at the closeness of George and Anne.) But Cromwell regularly chats with a lot of the ladies in waiting; one thing that makes him into a master mind is that he is always interested in what people are telling him, no matter how seemingly trivial the subject, and will use it sooner or later. Which gives Mantel the opportunity for a novel in which not a single sex scene takes place but because of all the gossip there is constant talk of sexual intrigue. One karmic irony for Cromwell: after having built his case against Anne on flimsy evidence and innuendo, and seen her executed, he suddenly starts to wonder about his later and hitherto unambigously lamented wife. Was she really always faithful to him? At last, the paranoia he used and fueled catches up with him and he can't get the thought out of his head again, much as he wants to.
Katherine of Aragon has one last scene early in the novel, and here I have to congratulate Mantel again, because even within that one scene her Katherine is tree dimensional, brave but not saintly, which given the situation she's in (close to her deathbed in exile) is hard to avoid, clever, and struck when Cromwell points out to her that if she had agreed to the end of her marriage, Henry would still be a Pope-obeying Catholic.
As mentioned before, the language of the novel is gorgeous, from the opening (in which Cromwell hunts, using falcons named after his dead daughters) onwards: His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.
The description of Anne's execution in the closing pages is harrowing, not least because the reader knows, as Cromwell does not, that he's looking at his own fate. Though we have a trickiness of pronoun again, "he" being sometimes Cromwell, sometimes the executioner, but the passage is so striking, no pun intended, that I'll end with it:
The executioner steps out and he can see - he is very close - Anne's eyes focus on him. The Frenchman bobs to his kneeds to ask pardon. It is a formality and his knees barely graze the straw. He has motioned Anne to kneel, and as she does so he steps away, as if he does not want contact even with her clothes. At arm's lengths, he holds out a folded cloth to one of hte women, and raises a hand to his eyes to show her waht he means. He hopes it is Lady Kingston who takes the blindfold; whoever it is, she is adept, but a small sound cromes from Anne as her world darkens. Her lips move in prayer. The Frenchman waves the women back. They retreat; they kneel, one of them alomst sinks to the ground anda is propped up by teh others; despite the veils one can see their hands, their helpless bare hands, as they draw their own skirts about them, as if they were making themselves small, making themselves safe. The queen is alone now, as alone as she has ever been in he rlife. She says, Christ have mercy, Jesus have mercy, Christ receive my soul. SHe raises one arm, again her fingers go to the coif, and he thinks, put your arm down, for God's sake put your arm down, and he could not will it more if - the executioner calls out sharply, 'Get me the sword.' The blinded head whips around. The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a s harp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-28 06:15 pm (UTC)And now I can finally mention my favourite part of this book to you, when Henry is shouting at Cromwell and he makes the pain-confusing gesture of the blacksmiths at him (successfully). It reads as so real, had been built up just nicely enough, and as a metaphor for being burnt by the material you work with is beautiful foreshadowing of his own fate.
Relatedly, I didn't find the background-related insults annoying. The reason they might seem a little... fake is that noble blood or even gentility is such an unreal thing to brag about in our days, something few can imagine being taken as deadly serious. So it comes across a little Mary Sue-ish, as when a protagonist is unfairly persecuted for having red hair or (shudder) violet eyes. But in Cromwell's world, these things were all too real and it would have been fantastical to imagine a world in which these things were not up for constant comment. Even Anne gets backtalk for being "just" a gentlewoman, and you can see the way the Boleyns are distaned by the older families for being sort of nouveau riche.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-29 10:29 am (UTC)Oh, of course the class snobery is incredibly real in Cromwell's world, but I still think Mantel is playing the sympathy game a bit with that, i.e. reminding us Cromwell is the underdog who made it to the top, even when he's there and actually a lot of other people are the current underdogs. Every author does that, it's not a criticism on my part, I just noticed. I also noticed that unless I managed to skip a page, she avoided the story that one of the reasons for the fallout between Anne and Cromwell was that Cromwell enriched himself personally from the dissolution of the monasteries and Anne took him to task for that. It's not something fitting her conception of Anne and Cromwell, and so it's not there. (As said story first shows up in the time of Elizabeth where of course authors suddenly had reason not to write ill of her mother anymore, it might be invented, but still: it exists.)