What I'm Reading: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

So this is my avatar! It's pretty much a cartoonized version of me. Devil horns, because I'm a troublemaker at heart. So that's that...on to the next thing!

I read Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to the incredible Wolf Hall, on vacation. It’s a historical novel—not as weighty as the first one, but still pretty dense—and not exactly relaxing vacation reading. Or so you would think. But I’d read the first one, and despite the fact that this isn’t exactly a beach read, I knew it was exactly what I needed to get me through an eleven-hour plane ride.

 Bring Up the Bodies picks up where Wolf Hall left off in the life of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII during the most turbulent years of his reign. Cromwell was the architect behind Henry’s most radical moves.  He engineered the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, in an age where divorce was quite simply not allowed—especially if your wife’s in-laws are sovereigns of their own, and your divorce would have massive political consequences. He was the mastermind behind Henry’s break with the Catholic Church—in a time when the Church had had a stranglehold on religious and secular life in Europe for over a thousand years. And he’d managed his own rise—from the son of a commoner to the most privy of the King’s privy chambers. He was a brilliant man who managed to rise to the top in a time when even the most brilliant commoners almost universally stayed commoners. And he got sh*t done. In my opinion, Henry VIII would have been nothing without Cromwell.

Cromwell has the reputation of a villain, and it’s a deserved one. A lot of that has to do with the way he orchestrated the downfall of Anne Boleyn and her execution. While part of Mantel’s mission is to cast Cromwell in a more human light, she does not take the position here that Anne was in fact guilty—a position most historians would agree with, I think. We see Cromwell setting up an innocent woman for execution for the simple reason that the King wills it—and Cromwell’s absolute purpose in life is to stay indispensable to the King.

And yet…I’m rooting for him. Strange as it is. And this, I feel, is a hallmark of genius storytelling. We’re rooting for Cromwell the way we root for Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones even though he’s practically introduced to us by throwing a young child out of a high window. Like George R.R. Martin, Mantel has the sheer genius to show us a man we’re primed not to like—because we all know the history and we know what happens to Anne Boleyn—and make us like him.

When I finished this book, I wanted more. I wanted the next in the series—because I know what happens in real life, and I’m just dying to see how Hilary Mantel handles the next chapter of Cromwell’s career. I’d brought some lighter books, but I wanted historical fiction. Real, meaty, sink-your-teeth-in historical fiction, served as rare as possible. Guess I’ll have to wait til the last book in the series comes out to get it.