Book Review: The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Mary Anne Ellis | Southern History Department, Central Library

(This review contains spoilers.)

One of the most eagerly awaited publishing events of the past decade, The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, is the third novel in Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, following Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The series chronicles the rise of Thomas Cromwell, son of a Putney blacksmith, from his obscure origins to the heights of power in the court of King Henry VIII. We last saw him at the conclusion of Bring Up the Bodies, looking on as former queen Anne Boleyn goes to her execution.

The Mirror and the Light picks up at the exact moment we left Cromwell eight years ago in Bring Up the Bodies, as he watches while Anne's ladies carry her headless body away in an arrow chest; the king had neglected to provide a coffin. Cromwell helped in Anne's rise to power and, when Henry wished to be rid of her, Cromwell also assisted in her downfall; from the first pages the novel is charged with his bleak realization that all things are mutable and that his present high position rests on the uneasy foundation of Henry's continued good will.

What will the King do, or be, or want, next? He is becoming impossible to predict and when Queen Jane Seymour—who has finally given Henry the male heir he craves—dies after childbirth, Cromwell makes his great misstep and helps negotiate a marriage for Henry with Anne of Cleves. Henry finds her repulsive at first sight and this is the beginning of the end for Thomas Cromwell. His troubles have been gathering with slow inevitability throughout the early chapters of the novel, but when the accumulating ripples of tension finally break, they do so with the unstoppable force of a tidal wave. For Cromwell has no one to rely on except himself. He has no great and powerful noble family to protect him, nothing except his own keen intelligence . . . but with his many enemies, that is not enough.

For readers who were accustomed to seeing negative portrayals of Cromwell, his role as a fairly sympathetic figure—particularly in this final novel, the story of his downfall—may come as a surprise. He is as history has described him: calculating, ruthless, predatory, but he is also a widower and a father who grieves for the children he has lost, who bends every effort to assure a good future for his remaining children and extended family. At the time of his execution we are left to reflect on the irony of one of his stray thoughts in the first chapter: "But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?"

Mantel's style can take some getting used to. This is not what I like to call a "potato chip" book, something you can gulp down and immediately reach for another. This novel is to be slowly savored and digested like a thick, juicy steak, or like rich dark chocolate. The Mirror and the Light has been a long time coming but for me it was definitely worth the wait. Highly recommended.