In Hilary Mantel's Brilliant "The Mirror & the Light," Thomas Cromwell Meets His Fate
Paparazzi stalk them. Shakespeare immortalized them. Whole libraries are devoted to their foibles and flaws. Britain’s kings and queens have long obsessed us, and it’s this primal attraction that has fueled Hilary Mantel’s masterful Wolf Hall trilogy, based on the troubled marriages of Henry VIII, the impulsive monarch with a wandering eye and a preference for decapitation, if divorce isn’t an option. With The Mirror & the Light, Mantel brings her signal achievement home with a dance between scepter and scaffold as her protagonist, Henry’s chief adviser, falls prey to his own insatiable ambition.
The central protagonist of Mantel’s epic is Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son, whose brilliance, charm, and hard work have raised him to the king’s right hand. The novel opens with the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second queen, and his marriage to the ethereal Jane Seymour (who will produce a long-desired heir to the throne). It then unfolds over four years as Lord Cromwell enriches England’s coffers, brokers treaties, wages a cold war against the pope, and manages his master’s mercurial love life. But with privilege comes peril: Any misstep could prove lethal.
The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel’s genius; it’s a richly hued mural of meticulous research, enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who hoard power and those who crave it.
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