Bring Up the Bodies

In Hilary Mantel's multi-volume story of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to King Henry VIII, Wolf Hall could be said to be the rise of Anne Boleyn, and Bring Up the Bodies to be the fall. It ends with her beheading, and the quick subsequent marriage of Henry to Jane Seymour. Cromwell, the centerpiece of these books, worked hard to make Anne Henry's bride, taking on the Pope; in this volume he works just as hard to bring her down.

What spurs him on? Loyalty, or perhaps a sense of survival. Early on he says of Anne that just looking at her makes his head wobble.  No one's life is safe in the court--it must have been nice just to be a dirt-poor peasant, you only had to worry about starvation, instead of being put to the rack.

It's hard to imagine that another telling of Anne Boleyn's downward spiral could have something new to say, but this book is amazingly good. It's better than Wolf Hall, if only because it was easier to follow (even the characters have trouble knowing how everyone is related, including Cromwell: "All these people are related to each other. Luckily, the cardinal left him a chart, which he updates whenever there is a wedding").

Again Mantel uses the present tense, and again she liberally uses pronouns; "he" refers to Cromwell exclusively. He seizes on Henry's fascination with Jane Seymour, and like the lawyer he is, seeks to undo everything that he worked for to get Henry annulled from Katherine of Aragon. Key is an accusation by Anne's brother's wife, Lady Rochford, that Anne has had lovers, including her own brother. Cromwell interrogates the accused lovers, and they all go to it, executed in one day, while Anne goes the next.

Bring Up the Bodies reads like a political thriller, and has stunning dialogue and descriptions. Being inside Cromwell's head is the only place to be, as the king is getting old and dull--he's almost a shadow figure, and is purposely an elusive creature here. Cromwell behaves like a man who sees himself as an actor in play. When someone mentions a particular women, he thinks things that made me laugh out loud: "Margaret Pole, that haggard papist battleaxe?"

While Cromwell is the focal point, of course Anne is vividly created. This time I couldn't help but imagine Natalie Dormer, who played her in The Tudors, her crooked smile and bewitching eyes: "He thinks Anne's eyes beautiful, though best when they gleam with interest, as a cat's do when she sees the whisk of some small creature's tail."

Much of the book is taken up with extended dialogues, including a magnificent set of scenes with the four accused lovers of Anne, with Cromwell their interrogator. He knows that they may not be guilty: "He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged."

In the end, there can't help but be sympathy for Anne, though this emanates from the writer's 21st century perspective. She basically was killed because she couldn't bear a male heir and the king got bored with her. She was a modern woman in a decidedly unmodern era, and her legacy was her daughter Elizabeth, one of the great rulers of England. The description of her death is both shocking and painful: "The blinded head whips around. The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore."