Skip to main content

The Mirror & the Light: Review

 Book Review

Title: The Mirror & the Light

Author: Hilary Mantel

Publisher: 4th 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.

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...