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A review by ithiliens
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
If you know me you know what this review is going to be. So I'd like to skip a lot of that and mention a few specifics.
The way Mantel writes about childhood makes me want to tear myself in half. Cromwell as a child, huddled under the execution viewing platform against the rain, is an image that lingers with me even among the many MANY others that also destroyed me in this book. Having read her memoir (and the other books in the trilogy) I knew the way she evokes childhood and the memory of it was wrenching. I don't really feel I have the distance or vocabulary right now to say much more about it but that it was even more affecting to me in this book. The scene that finally takes us to the murder much alluded to in the other books was similarly horrifying in the transfixing way an unwanted memory can be. These were scenes when you can feel the electric force of her writing and I often had to put the book aside for a day or two afterward to recover.
Much of Cromwell's moral shuttering that builds to the climax in Bring Up the Bodies is slowly peeled away here until he baldly admits his faults, the faults of others, the shattered reality of the world he's ruled (though still seems to evade real acknowledgement of culpability). The line (which I paraphrase) that the law is a fiction we create to help us get past atrocity really shook me. Mantel trained as a lawyer but I think this also speaks to the nature of fiction and especially historical fiction which she has been badgered about for as long as these books have been popular. There's a lot of stuff to dig into with that which I am again too sleep deprived rn (having finished this at 430am then passed out) to deal with but I expect I will be thinking about it for a long time.
The last point I'd like to make is about the ending. It rang perfectly true for me. I knew that it would circle back to the opening lines of Wolf Hall, but the last paragraph is for me one of the most perfect I have ever read. Thematically, structurally, emotionally, personally. These three books have provided me with one of the most significant reading experiences of my life and as reluctant as I am to "leave" them, I can't imagine a better ending. Goodbye, Cromwell. Man is wolf to man.
The way Mantel writes about childhood makes me want to tear myself in half. Cromwell as a child, huddled under the execution viewing platform against the rain, is an image that lingers with me even among the many MANY others that also destroyed me in this book. Having read her memoir (and the other books in the trilogy) I knew the way she evokes childhood and the memory of it was wrenching. I don't really feel I have the distance or vocabulary right now to say much more about it but that it was even more affecting to me in this book. The scene that finally takes us to the murder much alluded to in the other books was similarly horrifying in the transfixing way an unwanted memory can be. These were scenes when you can feel the electric force of her writing and I often had to put the book aside for a day or two afterward to recover.
Much of Cromwell's moral shuttering that builds to the climax in Bring Up the Bodies is slowly peeled away here until he baldly admits his faults, the faults of others, the shattered reality of the world he's ruled (though still seems to evade real acknowledgement of culpability). The line (which I paraphrase) that the law is a fiction we create to help us get past atrocity really shook me. Mantel trained as a lawyer but I think this also speaks to the nature of fiction and especially historical fiction which she has been badgered about for as long as these books have been popular. There's a lot of stuff to dig into with that which I am again too sleep deprived rn (having finished this at 430am then passed out) to deal with but I expect I will be thinking about it for a long time.
The last point I'd like to make is about the ending. It rang perfectly true for me. I knew that it would circle back to the opening lines of Wolf Hall, but the last paragraph is for me one of the most perfect I have ever read. Thematically, structurally, emotionally, personally. These three books have provided me with one of the most significant reading experiences of my life and as reluctant as I am to "leave" them, I can't imagine a better ending. Goodbye, Cromwell. Man is wolf to man.