The man who is made a member of the Privy Council and an earl but who the members of the noble families look down on because of his lowly birth. The poor, lonely man – the astute, wary man. I felt so sorry for “Thomas Cromwell”, the abused, runaway boy who becomes a rich and educated man, but whose life is in the hands of the increasingly deranged king. *Characters’ names given in quotation marks. Sometimes, it was a moment so spine-chilling that it stayed with me for ages. Sometimes nothing much happened, “Cromwell” just thought about something, or reminisced, or it might be a conversation between other characters, or a description of one of “Henry VIII’s” queens’ dresses. Every time I opened the book for another chapter or two, I was plunged into the world of “Thomas Cromwell” and the intricacies of his life. So Mantel did not only carry out this feat of creativity once, but three times, with the same effect each time of immersing the reader deeply into the period in which the novel is set, and into the lives of the characters who are depicted with a high degree of historical accuracy.

The main characters are again, as in the previous novels in the trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, “Thomas Cromwell”* and “King Henry VIII”* of England. Mantel calls him, turns out to have been simply waiting to be taken up and issued a soul.The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel (Publisher: Harper Collins Canada, publishing date: Mapaperback 912 pages all included) But “sleek, plump and densely inaccessible” Thomas Cromwell, as Ms. His portrait by Hans Holbein might be summed up as a depiction of inscrutability, while his lowly origins caused the great men of his day to emphasize his nobody-ness. Elton, Thomas Cromwell, as a person with feelings and private thoughts, has been a cipher from the start. Along the way we have been granted chilling glimpses into the mercurial mind of Cromwell’s master, Henry VIII, upon whose fluctuating desire, uneasy conscience and increasingly corpulent, ailing body the fate of the realm rests.Ī villain to Cobbett, a hero to hagiographer John Foxe, a legislative genius to historian G.R. Getting there, however, has been a lengthy meander through the consciousness of one of Britain’s greatest statesmen and legislators, a key player in the establishment of the Church of England and the creation of the modern state.

Without turning a page, we have known the “plot”: who will rise, who will fall, who will die-and when. It has taken Hilary Mantel 11 years, three volumes and more than 1,700 pages to dispatch, at last, the man William Cobbett called the “bloody ruffian, THOMAS CROMWELL.” Starting with “Wolf Hall” (2009), whose title sounded the death knell for Anne Boleyn, a sense of inevitability and doom has pervaded the novels.

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