As Cromwell sits comfortably in his Austin Friars house, we are made intensely aware that he is a ghost to us. The ghosts are a genius trick in a second way, though. Mantel’s sentences unfurl luxuriously her twisty, dream-distorted passages are a joy to read, but at the same time, to revel in them, as Cromwell does, is to be ensnared. The narrative occasionally tumbles into lengthy passages of exposition: on his father, on “the eel-boy” he killed in a childhood brawl, on the very real phantoms of Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More, reaching up from their graves in the first two books. Yet here more than ever, Cromwell is haunted by his past. This court still exists in The Mirror & the Light, but Cromwell is above it. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies displayed the violent, temperamental forces in Henry VIII’s court, where wives and Chancellors could lose their heads on a tyrant’s whim. Covering the period 1536 to 1540, it features a Thomas Cromwell who is comfortably settled in his position, no longer involved in the bloody business of ascension. The final novel in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is markedly different to its predecessors. Joseph Geldman reviews the third and final part of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed epic narrative about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.
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