hilary mantel the mirror and the light review

She also invents a childhood rivalry with More, with Cromwell a boy servant at the elite institute at which More is educated. Mantel exaggerates the poverty of Cromwell’s childhood and gives him a drunken, abusive father. Keeping up with the capricious Henry, a king haunted by his own miscarried sons and fear of impotence, meant disposing of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn (the antagonist of Book 2.) But establishing the Church of England meant conflict with the orthodox Catholic Thomas More (the antagonist of Book 1). When Wolsey fell from Henry’s favor, Cromwell took over, administering the country for Henry and nudging him towards a Protestant reformation of the English church. The real Cromwell was a brewer’s son who became a lawyer and later right-hand man to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the English churchman who failed to facilitate Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Throughout this trilogy, we have traveled inside the consciousness of Thomas Cromwell. But above all, it is an innovation in the ghost story. ‘The Mirror and the Light’ is an accomplishment in multiple forms at once: an expression of Mantel’s advanced academic understanding of Tudor history a poetic homage to the literary culture of the period a theological meditation on the eschatology of a Christian soul a Faust tale of damnation a feminist cry against ways in which women have historically been bought and sold.

Read all three together, and you realize we have been reading ghost stories all along. The last in the trilogy, ‘The Mirror and The Light,’ has just been published. ‘Wolf Hall,’ which traced the early life of Henry VIII’s most competent minister, was followed in 2012 by ‘Bring Up The Bodies.’ Between them, the two novels have sold over 5 million copies worldwide. She writes eloquently about the ghost nature of fantasy families, the phantoms who inhabit the lives we dream for ourselves. Mantel underwent an emergency hysterectomy at the age of 27, devastating her body and wrecking her chance of children. On the first page of her memoir ‘Giving Up The Ghost,’ she writes of catching a glimpse of her deceased stepfather on the stair – this is nothing unusual, she tells us, because “I am used to seeing things that ‘aren’t there.’” The chief ghost who haunts that memoir is ‘Catriona’, Mantel’s imagined daughter not merely unborn, but unconceived.

Hilary mantel the mirror and the light review