But though he framed his struggle with More and Catholicism as “the living against the dead” in Wolf Hall, he now finds that his own past will not let go of him, and that it may not be what he thought it was.Ĭromwell’s mistake, before the book even begins, is to have arranged the fall of Anne Boleyn so that (in Mantel’s telling) various enemies of Cromwell’s previous employer, Wolsey, fall with her. There’s no doubt as to which side her version of Cromwell is on - he wants nothing more than to shape the future. Mantel has previously framed the struggle surrounding the Reformation as one of the living new future against the dead, rotting - yet still powerful - past. “They are rewriting my life,” Cromwell thinks. The narrative of his time in the king’s service is turned into one of concealed treason every one of his actions has a new construction put on it. He meets the fate he engineered for, among others, Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, whose executions capped the previous two volumes. Cromwell was dispatched with equal haste, sent to the Tower of London and executed. Promoted by Cromwell, the match was quickly annulled after the king found his bride unappealing. Even the past can be changed, or at least the memory of it destabilized.Īs promised, The Mirror & The Light covers the last few years of Cromwell’s life, including his role in Henry’s ill-fated marriage to Anne of Cleves. The metaphor of mirror and light not only refers to its source, the historical Cromwell’s praise of Henry as a model king, but to the way one’s point of view on the same event shifts and changes with the angle. We still see what Cromwell sees, and, in this book, we are equally blindsided by some of the actions of other characters, though the clues were there all along.īut in addition to bringing the story of Thomas Cromwell to its sticky end, Mantel uses the concluding volume to cast a new light on the events of the first two books. We are still deep in Cromwell’s point of view without being limited to it every so often, the narration draws back to add an aside about England’s mythic, irrational past.

In many ways, The Mirror & The Light is merely a continuation - at somewhat greater length - of the techniques that made those books successful. Rare is the author of Tudor historical fiction who is neither influenced by nor responding to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. In the intervening years, the daring choice of protagonist, unusual descriptive prose style, and deep-dive point-of-view manipulation that made Mantel’s take on Henry VIII’s advisor fresh have all been absorbed into the mainstream.

MORE THAN A DECADE has passed since the first volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy appeared and catapulted the veteran author to literary superstardom.

Wolf hall mirror and the light