The Mirror & the Light: Review

 Book Review

Title: The Mirror & the Light

Author: Hilary Mantel

Publisher: 4^th Estate, London, 2020

Pages: 883

Price in India: 799

 

The first two volumes of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy told us the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise from a hamlet of Putney to Henry VIII’s palace. The battered son of an uncultured blacksmith and brewer rises to become the most powerful person in England after the king. The first two volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, described the rise of this shrewd manipulator. The last one, The Mirror & the Light, delineates the inevitable fall of the tragic hero.

Mantel’s undertaking seems to be to show us that Cromwell was indeed a tragic hero rather than a mere manipulator who ascended too high. She does that job eminently too. This last volume of the trilogy is as gripping as the other two if not more endearing by its slower pace and more poetic diction. Nearly hundred characters are brought together in this massive book to tell us the story of a man who asserts intimidatingly to his rivals who don’t always conceal their scorn for his lowly origin, “I stand where the king has put me. I will read you any lesson and you should learn.”

Cromwell knows his position and its power. The opening line of the novel, “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away,” sets the tone and the mood of the novel. The ‘he’ in the line is Cromwell who had just got Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry’s six wives, executed. Many men whom Cromwell didn’t like because of their association with the execution of his beloved Cardinal Wolsey have also been executed on charges fabricated cleverly by Cromwell. The novel begins with Anne Boleyn’s “small body” lying “belly down, hands outstretched, (swimming) in a pool of crimson.” The sight gives Cromwell appetite for a second breakfast.

There is much blood in the ensuing pages which tell the story of what happened in Henry VIII’s palace from May 1536 to July 1540 – from the execution of Anne Boleyn to that of Thomas Cromwell. There are celebrations too in between. As Christophe, Cromwell’s servant, says, “With this king one needs a reversible garment. One never knows, is it dying or dancing?” Death and dance parade on the stage according to Henry’s whims.

The whims of certain rulers are deadly. You should know how to deal with such rulers or else you may end up on the scaffold. Anne didn’t know that, for example. “She took Henry for a man like other men. Instead of what he is, and what all princes are: half god, half beast.” A few pages later, Cromwell reflects again: “What are princes? They think on murder all day long.” Mantel excels in laying bare the murderous narcissism of rulers like Henry VIII. Even religious rulers are not much above that sort of narcissism. In many places of the novel, Mantel draws our attention to the lustfulness of the bishops and the cardinals. These bishops and cardinals have also burnt too many persons at the stake in order to keep their perverse power unquestioned. Mantel implies that some of them also revelled in inventing stories about the men with whom Anne shared her body and in what all postures.

Cromwell knows how to deal with such rulers, of course. When such a king asks, “Am I going bald, Crumb?” our answer should be something like: “The shape of your Majesty’s head would please any artist.”

With such knowledge and perspicacity, Cromwell rises high. Too high. He thinks he knows everything that is happening around him. He has spies to pass on information. But there is something that he does not know. That lack is his tragic flaw. He does not know that the halo around his head is beginning to shine louder than that around Henry. “You have outgrown him,” one of his friends tells Cromwell towards the end. “You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.”

Cromwell realises his error, but it is too late. He realises that his beloved master Cardinal Wolsey “was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.”

Narcissists are essentially weak men who pretend to be strong. And weak men are far more dangerous than strong ones though “the temptation to cut off your wife’s head does not arise every year” even in a weak king with a strong armour on his chest.

The three volumes of Mantel’s trilogy together form a colossal epic that serves as a classical monument to the quintessential tragic hero who appears more like a villain.