Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

(Picador Press)

In Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel combines the art of fiction with a love of history to produce a vivid, imaginative account of the royal intrigue behind Henry VIII’s desire to rid himself of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The story, with all its terrifying ramifications, however, is Henry’s master secretary, Thomas Cromwell’s, to tell. It’s hard to imagine a more fully developed character in recent fiction, historical or contempo­rary. He is, in Mantel’s hands, powerful, wily, intelligent, grieved, worldly, animated, and thoughtful. Here he is, com­menting on his liege, Henry:

   You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying,    to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as    secure on his throne as he does on his horse. Looks can deceive. By night, he lies awake; he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days. He says, “Cromwell, Cromwell, what shall I do? Cromwell, save me from the Emperor.  Cromwell, save me from the Pope.” Then he calls his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, “Is my soul damned?”  (8)

   That rush of words, of images, the sheer energy and warmth of the language, is the mark of a writer in her power, the happy conjunction of art with subject matter. In an inter­view in The New Yorker, Mantel said that when she started writ­ing about this subject, “It began to unscroll before me like a film.”  Mantel says of herself that she has an intensely analytical mind and takes pains to be accurate with facts, but allows her­self great range in form. Her interest in historical accuracy includes using the legal phrase, “bring up the bodies” as the title of the book. The phrase was used for persons coming to trial and deemed already dead, accused of treason.   

   In Bring Up the Bodies and in the novel that precedes it, Wolf Hall, Mantel takes a new look at Cromwell and his nemesis, Thomas Moore, a canonized saint in the Catholic Church.   Mantel’s view is that Moore was sanctimonious and responsible for evil himself. Her view of Cromwell, with support from his­torian Geoffrey Elton, is that he was a statesman, one of the most powerful men in England for ten years. He was able to set in place structures of government that would survive incompetent royalty.  

   One of the pleasures of this novel, of its amplitude and sensuality, is the presence of women. Why am I surprised?  Henry had six wives and so much revolves around miscarriage, infertility, and infant mortality. No mystery that women wielded no direct power, but the outrageousness of the com­monly held beliefs about women is sheer comedy:

   The marriage of Lady Mary is discussed... If a young woman’s vital    spirits are bottled up, she becomes pale and thin, her appetite wanes, she begins to waste; marriage is an occupation for her, she forgets her    minor ailments; her womb remains anchored and primed for use, and shows no tendency to go wandering about her body as if it had noth­ing    better to do.  In default of a man, the Lady Mary needs strenuous exercise on horseback; difficult, for someone under house arrest. (234)

   Perhaps Mantel can write with particular relish about men’s attitudes toward women because of her own experience.  Struggling with illness over a long period of time, she was not able to have children and was told by a psychiatrist that ambi­tion is bad for women. She had already written a number of well-received books. In her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, she writes of her Irish Catholic upbring­ing in working-class Manchester. A very bright, high-strung child, she had a palpable sense of ghosts, guilt and evil that she has been able to use in her writing.

I enjoyed this novel immensely, more than I did Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel’s planned trilogy of Thomas Cromwell. At 400 pages rather than Wolf’s 600, Bring Up the Bodies is more compact and moves at an energetic pace that carries the reader along. Both books won the Booker Prize; Mantel is the only woman with that distinction.  She is writing the last book of the Cromwell trilogy in which we should see the end of Thomas Cromwell.  At the end of Bring Up the Bodies, Crom­well faces the future with a clear, pragmatic eye:

   His next task is somehow to reconcile the king and the Lady Mary;    to save Henry from killing his own daughter; and before that, to stop    Mary’s friends from killing him.  He has helped them to their new  world,    the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do without Cromwell too. They have eaten his banquet and now will want to sweep him out with the rushes and the bones. (403)

We know how it will end for Cromwell, a mere fact.  The his­torical novelist’s work is to give us the imaginative truth in all its spellbinding wonder.  Thankfully, with Cromwell, there will be more, later.

- Norita Dittberner-Jax