Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light

The Mirror and the Light -

I have long read Hilary Mantel with relish and sometimes even reverence. Beyond Black is a book I gave to the man I ended up wedding, not least for his reception of it. In this her latest creation she again conjures forth the crab’s nest that is Henry VIII’s court, and dealing once more the spirits of the departed. God knows there is a Shakespearean quantity of corpses lingering from the first two books of the trilogy, not to speak of the last. They pester the protagonist, Thomas Cromwell: the phantoms of Wolsey, of More, of Anne Boleyn and of her lovers. They haunt these pages, apparitions on the margins. And just when you decide they are metaphorical, they take on substance; just when you decide the dead are truly treading on the outskirts of Cromwell’s life, they vanish into abstraction, a figment you never should have trusted. I hope to take guidance from this masterful treatment of ectoplasm for my own novel which also deals with the dead come back and how -visible or no- they dog the present,.

Otherwise the entire series - Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and now The Mirror and the Light- is a masterful portrayal, of power and its effects, radiating outward from the King. It is a study in the turning point of the early modern and medieval mind, as shown by Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, one looking to the future the other to the past. Of course we must ask ourselves, too, with Bruno Latour, if we have ever been modern. Still Thomas the advisor rises. He is the power behind the power with a machiavellian intelligence while Henry, sovereign, is instructed by the long line of princely “mirrors/miroers ” -as such books of advice were called, in hopes that a ruler might study himself and examine his own soul. This until the Florentine thinker put paid to notions of ideal Christian rulers as God’s agents whose pure souls must carry out His will within the lands he has so granted them. This becomes a “miroer” in and of itself but using the great princes and their court to reflect back to us our own selves, our hearts and souls. Have we ever been modern indeed?

It is less gripping than it is in fact mesmerizing. I find that not only can I put it down, that I must if I am to fully take in both the penetrating portraits, the interwoven power plays of politics and faith, and the luminous prose in which all of this is embedded, like a ring on a royal finger, the emeralds and the rubies glimmering within a golden setting