...he has no one to talk to, except Christophe and his turnkey and the dead; and with daylight the ghosts melt away. You can hear a sigh, a soufflation, as they disperse themselves. They become a whistling draught, a hinge that wants oil; they subside into natural things, a vagrant mist, a coil of smoke from a dying fire. [loc. 13141]
The finale to the trilogy that began with Wolf Hall and continued with Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light covers the last four years of Thomas Cromwell's life, from the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536 to Cromwell's own execution in 1540. Cromwell is more powerful and successful than ever, but he's haunted by the dead: Cardinal Wolsey his mentor, Thomas More, the men and women he's condemned and sent to the scaffold or the pyre. At 900-odd pages, there's a certain amount of repetition, and the tension is uneven: but stitch by stitch, Cromwell's enemies collate the information that will lead him to the executioner's axe.
We get a strong sense of Cromwell's determination to improve England, even if it means going against his king's wishes. He is clear-eyed about royalty, describing princes as 'half god and half beast', inhuman creatures. When Cromwell praises Henry as 'the mirror and the light of other kings', he is aware that the light might turn away from him and leave him in darkness. It's no accident that the axe, at the end, is inscribed speculum justitiae: mirror of justice.
Though this is a patriarchal world, there are women with agency: among them are three daughters. Dorothea, Wolsey's daughter, tells Cromwell that she believes he betrayed her father, wounding him to the quick; he cultivates the Princess Mary, even though closeness to her might attract charges of treason; and his own unexpected daughter seems to repudiate him. By the end of the novel, he is alone except for the dead, and his loyal servant Christophe -- one of the few wholly fictional characters in the trilogy, and one whose final words in the novel are a splendid denunciation of Henry's justice. And we've come full circle from Cromwell's father yelling at him 'so now get up': but we end knowing so much more of his rise, and his fall.
Mantel's prose is precise and beautiful -- I especially liked Cromwell's description of Crivelli's Annunciation, quoted below -- and the final pages are incredibly powerful. I especially liked the sense of antiquity, of London's and England's history: and the sense of inevitability as Cromwell's enemies close in. Splendid, moving: but I could not fully immerse myself for the whole novel, due to its length, and I feel my experience was lessened thereby.
Perhaps you have seen, in Italy, a painting of a house with one wall removed? The painter does this to show you the deep interior of a room, where at a prie-dieu a virgin kneels, surrounded by bowls of ripening fruit. Her expression is private and reserved; she has kicked off her shoes and she is waiting to be filled with grace. Already you can see the angel hovering above the rooftops, a blur of gold on the skyline, while below in the street the people go about their business, and some of them glance upward, as if attracted by a quickening in the air. In the next street, through an archway, down a flight of steps, a housewife is hanging out washing, and someone is rising from the dead. White pelicans sit on rooftops, waiting for Christ’s imminence to be pronounced. A mitred bishop strolls through the piazza, a peacock perches on a balcony among potted plants, and striated clouds like bales of silk roll above the city: that city which itself, in miniature form, is presented on a plat for the viewer, its inverse form dimly glowing in the silver surface: its spires and battlements, its gardens and bell towers. [loc. 2668]
No comments:
Post a Comment