Review by eowyns_helmet - Bring Up the Bodies

A review by eowyns_helmet
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

5.0

When I tried [b:Wolf Hall|6101138|Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall, #1)|Hilary Mantel|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1336576165s/6101138.jpg|6278354], it sat on my nightstand day after day, and I must have read and reread the first 50 pages twenty times. It seemed interesting, but I just couldn't engage. I should say that this came at a very stressful time for me, so I wasn't doing much reading of anything but short scraps on the web and the newspaper. I picked up this book at a very different time, Christmas Day, after all of the presents were open, the breakfast cooked and eaten, the Internet OFF and nothing at all on the horizon but a lazy, rainy day. I was able to dig in, and discovered a masterful storyteller, a truly spectacular writer and a mesmerizing tale (all the more so because you know what will happen to Anne Boleyn and her head). I think [b:Wolf Hall|6101138|Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall, #1)|Hilary Mantel|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1336576165s/6101138.jpg|6278354] just came at the wrong time for me. Mantel is nothing if not a demanding writer and as a reader you have to be paying full attention to get every last bit of wonder from her prose. If your attention wavers, you may lose a delicious skewering, a heartbreaking observation or a completely delightful turn of phrase. A marvel on every page and in every paragraph.

Here, for instance, is an early description of Anne Boleyn, where Mantel does something brilliant with fashion and color:

Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colors should have had a fresh, maidenly charm; bul all [Cromwell] could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant froars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and garroched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; her kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives.

There are a spectacular number of things going on here -- a foreshadowing of Anne's death, Cromwell's dry, workmanlike use of executions, the political temper of the times, Anne's own rapaciousness -- all through color and a bit of jewelry.

And here a description of the slimy Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, uncle to both Anne and Catherine Howard, a future beheaded wife of Henry VIII:

So here's the Duke of Norfolk, expecting to be fed. Dressed in his best, or at least what's good enough for Lambeth Palace, he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher. Brieght fierce eyes under unruly brows. Hair an iron stubble. His person is meagrem, sinewy, and he smells of horses and leather and the armourer's shop, and mysteriously of furnaces or perhaps of cooling ash: dust-dry, pungent.

A review by eowyns_helmet Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

A review by eowyns_helmet
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel