A great feat of literary scholarship, for sure. Moments where the novel slips into being too knowingly educational stick out because they’re rare (see eg. the baying crowd shouting hocus pocus and hoc est corpus interchangeably, or the invitation to look up the meaning of “jakes”); overwhelmingly we’re allowed to luxuriate in a world-depiction that feels authentic without struggling with linguistic verisimilitude. The rattling repartee and spicy detail of intrigue feed an impression of the affinity of Mantel’s prose with the cinema of Martin Scorsese in something like Goodfellas or The Irishman, which draw us into a meticulously and lovingly constructed historical/geographical milieu through the eyes of ascendant antiheroes, never escaping their perspectives (hence Mantel’s much-overblown reliance on the ‘he’ pronoun here, inevitably referring to our protagonist but clearly a stand-in for the authorial ‘I’ enjoying the fantasy).
Cromwell looms over the plot like a chef: attentive to so many projects at once, sprinkling his influence here or folding a particular emotional colour into the mix there. Always lurking and calculatingly reticent, his principle talent is to appear almost passive in his subtlety, allowing the flames of ambition or the chill of mistrust to carry the burden of diplomatic work. But no amount of cultured precision or encyclopaedic resourcefulness is alluring enough to distract our attention from the knife in his hand. What’s engaging about his rise is not the risks that attend to it along the way (it always feels fairly inevitable; he’s really the only wolf at the hall) but its shift in nature from boisterous, plucky dilettante to merciless single-minded machiavel.
But while Cromwell has a mind like a memory palace, the list of personages at the front of the book seems more like a literary crutch than a mnemonic. I started laughing early on at the (acknowledged) profusion of Thomases and Annes in this company, but the true difficulty of telling the cast apart is the price of Mantel’s meticulous scholarship. A host of secondary characters flit in and out of view, joining sketchily delineated conversations in an unceasing and increasingly undifferentiated blur of babble. Rafe is Richard, Suffolk is Norfolk, the Boleyns and the Howards lead a bewildering masked ball and perseverant Wriothesley is nobody at all.
The mounting showdown between Cromwell and More holds much promise because the latter is not just a mind to match the former: he is as well-defined a voice, too (and equally morally complex, a refreshing conservative catholic counterpart to Cromwell’s pragmatist radicalism). But Cromwell’s flighty attention never settles on his great foe, his physical presence never lingers at Chelsea or the tower, and we’re deprived of the appetising opportunity to experience such a great and fascinating mind locked in a prolonged tussle with an equal — be that More, feisty Anne Boleyn or the imposing cardinal. The persistent lack of focus, the constant signposting of new dates and new places in every chapter and every section belies, I think, the truly elastic nature of our psychological experience of time that the the more successful modernists were in search of. The most evocative passages describe the ghosts lingering in Cromwell’s life, but Mantel’s own reanimation of her historical figures has a less tenacious grip on the memory.
Here is a particularly invigorating passage, in which Cromwell dresses down the hapless Earl of Northumberland while musing on the generational, even epochal disparity between their respective conceptions of power:
‘The king will take your title away, and your land, and your castles, and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot.’
‘He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights.’
‘Then let’s say I will.’ Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortress, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissary note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder shot.
Mantel’s affinity for Cromwell is obvious here: he stands looking forward towards us, into the future, ready to weaponise it against the inertial interests of the past. In his mind’s eye the light of modernity punctures through the fog of antiquity; Cromwell’s methods anticipate a distant century where power grows increasingly abstract, the weighable wealth of King Henry a hill of beans next to the ones and zeroes of stock exchange, the click of the mechanism of the gun less deadly by far than the push of a button on a console in a military command centre on a different continent. Invigorating indeed. Two pages later the unusual vehemence of Cromwell’s attack is clarified: ‘He thinks of Harry Percy [the Earl], walking in to arrest the cardinal, keys in his hand…’ wait, did he? Which one is the Earl of Northumberland, again? He is another three words on the page, he’s most likely going to be on the test, and you’d better keep quiet and hope that Mrs Mantel didn’t hear you ask.
widerthanpictures 