hilary mantel bring up the bodies summary

The striking young woman whose unusual good looks and charms seduced the restless king is now a harried figure, frantic to give him the male heir he desires above all things. Of course it helps that in Anne Boleyn he has such an unsympathetic foil, for if she was unpleasant as the simpering wily upstart determined to climb up the ladder in “Wolf Hall,” she is still more so now that she is crowned and anointed. “Thomas More, in his room in the Tower, had said to him, ‘Where will you strike next, Cromwell? You are going to pull all England down.’ He had said, I pray to God, grant me life only as long as I use my power to build and not destroy.”īut of course the question recurring throughout this novel is what is he building, apart from his ever-expanding power base? Is there an underlying purpose, a master plan, behind all his Machiavellian maneuverings? Perhaps Mantel’s most remarkable achievement is to enlist just enough of the reader’s sympathy to empathize with Cromwell as they perch on his shoulder and at times even enter his mind - if not quite his soul - as he works his wiles on victims and those who can help him engineer their downfall. It is a world where literally all bets are off and Cromwell is free to move real live people as coldly and calculatingly as if they really are chess pieces: Such shadings are key to the effectiveness of Mantel’s fictive re-creation of the vicious world of intrigue and mortal danger that was the court of Henry VIII, where one queen (Katherine of Aragon) can be cast aside for another, who in turn is disposed of still more summarily and brutally.

The good news is that it is more than the equal of its predecessor when it comes to intensity and drama, its portrait of Cromwell ever more evocative and nuanced as he disposes of a queen, more elevated than a mere cardinal (Wolsey) and saint (Thomas More), whose downfalls were front and center in “Wolf Hall.” The shadow that hangs ever so subtly over “Bring Up the Bodies” is that in Cromwell’s masterly transformation of Anne Boleyn from Henry VIII’s crowned consort to a headless body in the Tower of London, he may, for all his devious triumph in bringing off such a coup, finally have bitten off more than even he will be able to chew. Originally intended to take Cromwell through the four years that it took him to fall from the pinnacle of power (where we left him at the end of “Wolf Hall”) to his own appointment with the executioner’s ax, “Bring Up the Bodies” forms the middle volume of what is to be a trilogy. Hilary Mantel’s novel about the Tudor political puppet-master supremo Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall,” winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for fiction, was so richly packed with character and action that it was bound to burst its banks.

Hilary mantel bring up the bodies summary