Review: Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great historical fiction is great because it refracts a history we already know for the age in which we read it. This is, as so many acknowledge, great historical fiction, but it is so in intriguing and original ways.

To start with, this chronicle of the late-middle years of Henry VIII, when his chief advisor Thomas Cromwell negotiates his desires and long-term interests, has clear hints of our own historical moment.

Above all, we get a Henry VIII who is weirdly reminiscent of Donald Trump. Both men are tyrannical in the sense that they expect their whims to stand as law. They see self-interest and the interest of the state as identical, unable to recognize that their desires – desires in which sex and self-aggrandizement are indistinguishable – send after-shocks across everyone in their orbit. As Cromwell puts it at one point, “To succeed with him, one must know his mind. When he changes it, one is exposed for having put oneself forward.”

There are even strangely coincidental qualities between Henry and ‘Donald.’ Both try to hide their morbid obesity, carrying themselves as if it is a sign of great retained vigor. Both are, as this novel plays out, dealing with third wives. In each case, the first was a European with a claim to comparable social standing, and the marriage lasted long enough to see children into near adulthood. (And, in the ending of each of those first marriages, the surviving children found themselves having to favor their deposed mother while waiting their opportunity to take advantage of their father’s position and power.) In each the second was to a woman accused of using powerful sexual wiles upon him, a woman who was – at a distance – desirable but whose unceasing attentions as a wife proved too much (or proved to lessen her charms). And in each the third was desirable in large part for her meekness, for her seeming attachment to silence.

But the real historical relevance here centers on Cromwell, who, as we come to see him, effectively invents what Trump supporters have come to call “the deep state.” Cromwell is neither “well-born” nor overwhelmingly wealthy. He is, instead, the most astute student of his era in the ways that power moves across the country. He stands in contrast to the powerful families that would marry into the monarchy or benefit from an ally’s doing so: the Seymours, Boleyns, Poles, Howards, and Carews.

As Cromwell works his legislative wonders, one wealthy house or another rises. The peers of the nation see themselves as above him, routinely reminding him they are higher than he is, but they can’t see what the next half-millennium will reveal: that the modern state endures no matter who temporarily commands it. (SPOILER: And his revenge is total and sweet.)

In the midst of that, the central drama is Henry himself, a man who lacks the wisdom to see how dramatically he is shaping his nation and, as a partial consequence, loses sight of his own mortality. He desperately wants a son, an heir to carry forward what he’s begun. The nation demands one as well, but not for his narcissistic reasons. Instead, it wants an heir for the collective survival of England itself.

Only Cromwell can see to serving both those motives for the same end. In doing so, he brings into being the modern state apparatus that we see so tested today.

I need a quick word on Mantel’s method as well, though. Most historical fiction functions by bringing past characters to life, by making them seem somehow human or, for lack of a better word, modern. Instead, Mantel gives us each character as the product of deep calculation. We never really get to know Cromwell; instead, we see him in moment after moment (and that’s a lot of moments when you add up this one, its equally excellent prequel, Wolf Hall, and the to-be-published finale, The Mirror and the Light), always answering the needs of history before he answers the needs of Mantel’s story.

The metaphor that comes to mind, and sorry if it’s obscure, is pre-calculus. Rather than depending upon a calculus that produces a formula for determining the curve of a line at every point, Mantel seems to recalculate the arc of Cromwell’s career at every different point. She’ll sketch a scene in deep detail, bring it to a conclusion, and then begin a new one with an abrupt transition marked sometimes by a date and sometimes by a sharp scene break.

You can almost see the penciled figures in the margin as she notes an external change in power relations. For instance, when Anne Boleyn becomes pregnant a second time it elevates her, and when she loses the child it sets in motion changes to the entire power dynamic of the government.

Cromwell never feels as if he is someone we could talk to. Rather he feels like a succession of still photos, each carefully realized from what we know of the larger historical moment. There’s a discomfort in that; we never, for instance, get the easy gift of a Tudor world made to feel like today’s. Instead. Mantel pushes us to come as close as the facts permit. She takes cold artifacts and makes them relevant, but she stops short of giving them a pulse. It falls to us to perform the alchemy that makes them come to life, and the fact that Mantel can pull that off says all I need to know about why she’s won two Booker prizes for this remarkable work.

If all that weren’t enough, Mantel is a real master of prose. I end with a gem I couldn’t find another place for, a sentence so subtle and clever that it reflects the subtle mind and clever stratagems of Cromwell himself: “The Italians say the road from England to hell is well paved and runs downhill.”


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