Is "The Mirror and the Light" as Good as "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies"?
Wolf Hall is a sheer wonder of a work of fiction, with all the thrilling terror of a shuttle bursting through the clouds clear through to where the heavens cap the sky. Riding the same momentum, Bring up the Bodies hurtles the protagonist—and us along with him—toward some nameless rock in the void, where he’s bound to crash and, should he survive, be forced to contend with hostile inhabitants. Bring up the Bodies carries on the richly textured prose and psychologically probing narration that mesmerized readers of Wolf Hall, but now in the service of a more tightly focused and propulsive plot, making it simultaneously a fit successor and a startlingly fresh sequel. The questions hanging over both novels are how high will Thomas Cromwell soar and how will he wend his way safely through the myriad dangers menacing his ascent. Somewhere along the way, though, we also find ourselves wondering, what will Cromwell be forced to do to protect himself and those in his charge; just how far will he have to go to satisfy his king, when dissatisfaction spells death? And how will Cromwell live with what he’s had little choice but to do?
The Mirror and the Light, the third and final installment of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, has elements of both its predecessors, along with a few we haven’t yet seen. It lacks something of the thrilling sense of discovery and adventure on offer in Wolf Hall—that initial launch into the heavens—and only at a few points does it induce the exquisite dread and desperate push to arrive at a resolution that make Bring up the Bodies so engrossing. But there’s more than enough wonder and heartbreaking magnificence on offer to even the balance. If the earlier two novels encompass Cromwell’s rise and his transit through the uncharted and deadly expanse, the third serves as a record of his sojourn on the alien world, every page subtly eloquent of his realization that he’ll never make it home again. The question hovering over every scene this time around: which of his enemies’ multifarious plots will be the one to finally ensnare him, the one that fixes him in place while the nobles he’s so often confounded in the past rush to drive in their spears?
The most authoritatively scathing of the critical responses to this final book of the trilogy was Daniel Mendelsohn’s in The New Yorker. The Mirror and the Light, Mendelsohn points out, begins in 1536, just after the execution of Anne Boleyn, a sentence which Cromwell himself contrived in order to free his king for yet another marriage, and ends with Cromwell’s own death in 1540. The novel “does cover those years,” Mendelsohn notes,
but the tightly symmetrical trajectories that organized the first two volumes and generated their morals and meanings have gone. This book has to embrace a concatenation of major events, any one of which could be the matter of an entire novel. We get the popular uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace; the brief queenship of Jane Seymour, the birth of her son, the future Edward VI, and her death soon afterward; the selection of the German princess Anne of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife, a match that was urged by Cromwell in part because of his desire to move England closer to the Protestant German states—and whose failure was to doom Cromwell himself. (Some things even he couldn’t manipulate: the King found Anne physically distasteful, and the marriage was annulled.) Henry’s unhappiness with the whole affair was a turning point in his relations with his chief minister, whose fall from power occupies the final section of the novel.
No surprise, then, that the new book—seven hundred and fifty-four pages long, complete with a seven-page list of the dramatis personae—is Mantel’s longest yet. Unfortunately, it’s beyond even her skill to hold these disparate happenings together, and the result is a bloated and only occasionally captivating work.
While Mendelsohn leaves unanswered the question of what role “morals and meanings” play in his response to a novel, he does relate which trajectories in the earlier novels he’s referring to: “The two books have the same basic plot: Cromwell’s ascent to ever-greater positions of power is contrasted with the downward trajectory of a queen against whom he connives.” This is true enough of Bring up the Bodies, but the character in Wolf Hall whose downfall is the most salient is Cromwell’s mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, not the queen Katherine. And the difference in the amount of space given to the two plots is such that any reader of that first novel would marvel at Mendelsohn’s mischaracterization. How could anyone overlook the far more important Wolsey plot, which sent Cromwell on a subtly concealed and prolonged quest for vengeance?
There are a few other odd things about Mendelsohn’s review. For one, three quarters of the piece is about Mantel’s earlier works, which he discusses with a blend of warm praise and fussy condescension. This is common enough practice for some longer reviews, but here the extra content seems to serve no other purpose than to lend Mendelsohn himself more authority—as if he’s straining to show us just how deeply familiar he is with Mantel’s writing. When he finally gets around to discussing her latest offering, he gives the sense that he’s somehow personally offended by what he takes as its outright failure, writing,
By the time you get to Cromwell’s execution—a brilliantly imagined moment, and perhaps the best single scene here—the incidents and details, all no doubt with some basis in history, have overwhelmed any discernible pattern. I found my attention wandering more than once as I made my way through an elaborate description of a court entertainment, a subplot involving an anonymous gift to Cromwell of a leopard, and a visit to baby Elizabeth, who’s cranky because she’s teething; and even started to wonder—a thought unimaginable during my reading of the first two books—whether this particular historical figure really merits nearly two thousand pages of fiction.
Mendelsohn is at pains to emphasize just how much of a disappointment The Mirror and the Light is in light of Mantel’s earlier work. It’s a fair enough point to make, if that was his honest response, but he takes it suspiciously far, concluding his review by writing,
I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.
But, for all the additional events it relates, nothing in “The Mirror and the Light” is really new—or, I should say, really “novel.” The great quantity of matter here will no doubt satisfy fans of both the Tudors and Mantel; but since when was that the point? If an author has told a tale well, given it a firm shape and delineated its themes, brought its hero sufficiently to life to leave an indelible impression, she’s done her job. Everything else is just words, words, words.
Reading these passages, I couldn’t help but chuckle at how unselfconsciously Mendelsohn lives down to the caricature of the New Yorker crowd as a bunch of prissy snobs. (Full disclosure: I’m a recovering subscriber.) This passage also serves as a helpful summary of what Mendelsohn believes makes for a successful novel: a “firm shape” with “delineated” themes and a convincing protagonist who leaves an impression—though those first two ingredients are rather vague.
Mendelsohn may be bitter about the novel not paying dividends for all the effort it demands. You don’t get the sense, however, that he’s pressed for time, what with all the research he did into Mantel’s pre-Cromwell oeuvre. And, his wildly off-the-mark take on the opposing trajectories in Wolf Hall notwithstanding, he has plenty of admiration for the earlier books in the series. So, we have to ask, is The Mirror and the Light really so terrible when compared to Mantel’s other Cromwell books? Is it all just a mess of historical scenes adding up to nothing in particular? Let’s just say not everyone had the same response Mendelsohn did. Here’s how author and critic Stephanie Merritt puts it in the Guardian:
One reviewer complained of Wolf Hall that it had no plot, which strikes me as a wilfully obtuse failure of reading. These books are precision-engineered, and none more so than The Mirror and the Light. It may be less obviously dramatically focused than Bring Up the Bodies, which spanned less than a year and concentrated almost exclusively on events leading up to Anne’s death, but the plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller. Chekhov’s gun is there on every page: words spoken carelessly or in jest are later repeated in a court of law, their meaning twisted; gifts given in innocence are produced with new motives ascribed. The technical skill required to marshall the events of these four years between 1536 and 1540 – which include the dissolution of the monasteries, the northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the political manoeuvring that resulted in Henry’s short-lived fourth marriage to Anna of Cleves – while rendering those events comprehensible and dramatic to contemporary readers, is breathtaking.
Is the novel a “great quantity of matter” only Mantel’s most blinkered fans can appreciate or a “precision-engineered” work “shaped as meticulously as any thriller”? (Mendelsohn’s review appeared a week and a day after Merritt’s—making me wonder if he deliberately inverted her evaluation.) Is Mendelsohn succumbing to his envy of a more successful author, directing his contempt at the popular audiences who’ve yet to take any notice whatever of his own work? Or is Merritt, a Brit like Mantel, indulging in a bit of nationalistic favoritism?
Our default response probably ought to be to ascribe these diametrically opposed opinions to differing tastes, but in this case I’m going to argue that Mendelsohn’s take is simply wrong. I base this conclusion on several points he makes in his essay—almost all the points he tries to make—that suggest he failed to grasp what most readers probably found patently obvious. To wit, he fails to find the “discernable pattern” around which the various historical details cohere because he’s looking in the wrong place. And he arrives at this rather embarrassing failure through a misapplication of his own idiosyncratic approach to criticism.
The main principle implicit in all of Mendelsohn’s reviews, including in the lines already quoted above, is that a work of fiction should be held together by a central theme. He also seems to believe all the best themes originally found their expression in the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. As fellow critic Jackson Arn explains, “Mendelsohn sees books and films, fundamentally, as vessels in which Greco-Roman archetypes are sealed forever; to analyze them is to peel away everything unique or particular until the archetypes lie naked for all to see.” Here’s how Arn goes on to describe Mendelsohn’s approach to criticism: “Pick a popular subject. Link it to the ancients. From time to time, spice things up by dissing those pesky youths who are ruining everything by reviewing books on Amazon.”
Mendelsohn’s elitism notwithstanding, I’ve read and enjoyed several of his reviews over the years, though I nearly always disagree with his conclusions. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie Troy for instance, despite its undeniable hokeyness, but found his withering review gratifyingly erudite—and just interesting. He’s probably on to something with his theory that central organizing themes play a critical role in our appreciation of stories and that most of the best themes have a long history, but I’d add he’s a bit vague on the distinction between themes and plots. Regardless, in treating time-tested themes or plots as archetypes, he’s buying in to Carl Jung’s theory that stories derive their power from an ability to project back into the mind some of its own inborn dynamics. The more likely explanation for the tendency of some themes to recur in story after story across cultures and through the ages is that these are the ones that outcompeted other themes in other stories in their struggle to grab our attention, evoke our emotions, and haunt our thoughts. Some stories simply work better than others, and these are the ones most likely to inspire new generations of storytellers. It’s a sort of natural selection playing out in the environment of our minds, themselves hybrid constructions of both biological and cultural evolution.
The difference between these two theories is subtle, but their application leads to wildly divergent takes on any given work. Mendelsohn’s view is conservative in that every new work points back to earlier works, adjusting them for modern sensibilities. The evolutionary view is more open-ended, allowing for—even predicting—more and greater innovation when it comes to the storyteller’s toolkit. This is because there’s no guarantee the stories which caught on in the past will continue to resonate in the future, as minds are altered more and more through cultural change. There’s also no reason to assume that simply because a story outcompeted most of the others at a given time, in a given cultural context, that still better stories couldn’t have been crafted, ones that would have even more successfully commandeered people’s imaginations, but that simply went undiscovered.
Mantel’s chief innovation with her Cromwell trilogy lies in the style of narration she uses both to reveal her protagonist’s character and to tell his story. The technical term for her use of narrative perspective is free indirect discourse, and you can find examples of its use at least as far back as Austen and Flaubert. But Mantel stands much closer to her protagonist than these earlier practitioners. So closely melded are her own authorial messages to her character’s thoughts and perceptions that the narration seamlessly shifts between first and third person to meet the needs of each scene. Mantel’s “he” is fluidly and poetically interwoven with Cromwell’s “I”, with the effect that reading the works in the trilogy feels like more an act of communion than of voyeurism. The joy of experiencing these novels comes far more from sharing mental space with Cromwell than from any exploration of the thematic material, as rich as that material is.
Characteristically, Mendelsohn remains perfectly oblivious to any element of the novels that can’t be traced back to the ancients. He doesn’t even mention Mantel’s approach to perspective, even though for most readers the merging of narration with characterization is what’s most remarkable about these works. What’s most remarkable about Mendelsohn’s failure to see what so many of us love about Mantel’s writing, though, isn’t that his critical approach has no vocabulary to describe her greatest achievements; it’s that he flubs even the part that most interests him. Here’s how he supports his claim that The Mirror and the Light contains too much historical material with no discernable pattern.
A structure implicit in the history of Cromwell’s final years is one that literature has loved to exploit, and Mantel tries hard to make it work. If, in the first two books, the protagonist’s trajectory was an upward one, the arc in the third is the old Greek one that goes from hubris to nemesis.
Note that Mendelsohn refers to the Icarus theme as implicit, failing to credit Mantel for working it out deliberately. That’s in fact the problem he has with the novel. He goes on,
The hubris theme is too intermittent, too submerged beneath the exhausting accumulation of events and details, to make things cohere. Other tactics fall short, too. As the book reaches its climax, there is a feverish increase of flashbacks to Cromwell’s childhood—many of which, such as recollections of his father’s vicious beatings, repeat incidents familiar from the previous installments, presumably in order to create echoes and parallels that will give some kind of shape to this mass. (There are even ghosts: Thomas More hovers, as does a talkative Wolsey. The past is never past.) But the gesture fails, and the repetitions feel merely repetitive.
Ah, but what if Mantel pushed the hubris theme to the background on purpose? What if Mendelsohn has simply missed the actual theme tying together all these supposedly disparate historical details? In that case, it wasn’t Mantel who failed Cromwell. It was Mendelsohn who failed Mantel—along with his own readers.
Before I go on to show that this is exactly what happened, let me make some concessions to Mendelsohn. First, whereas the first two novels in the series were from start to finish exhilarating to read, The Mirror and the Light is heavier, more dragged down by the protagonist’s past than propelled by the promise of his future. One of the chief pleasures of reading scenes in the earlier novels comes from knowing Cromwell almost always has an ace up his sleeve when dealing with the nobles who despise his presumption at even being in their presence. In this latest installment, though, opportunities to take delight in Cromwell’s deft maneuvering are fewer and farther between. “A realm’s chief councillor should have a grand plan,” Cromwell muses at one point. “But now he’s pushing through, hour to hour, not raising his head from his business” (652). For me personally, and I imagine for many other readers, this makes the novel more serious and difficult—not in the sense of forcing us to slog through less engaging scenes, but in the way it’s more exciting to see a legendary fighter in his prime than in the twilight of his career, even though the later victories are in many ways more impressive (think Ali beating Foreman).
What I have to point out here, though, is that Cromwell’s seeming decline isn’t owing to his hubris, and it certainly isn’t owing to any failure or oversight on Mantel’s part. Rather, his lapses come from an odd complacency, one bordering on resignation, which is a symptom of something quite separate from hauteur or senescence. Aside from being the first bit of “novelty” Mendelsohn should have noticed in his reading, this symptom also provides a clue to the novel’s true central theme.
But first, a second concession: Mantel is writing from Cromwell’s perspective, and Cromwell does his best to avoid noticing or thinking about what’s really motivating him. The following passage from The Mirror and the Light reveals both the novel’s central theme and the protagonist’s attitude toward dwelling on it.
When Cromwell assures Henry that Jane will not fail to give him a son, he responds:
“That’s easy to say, but the other one made promises she could not keep. Our marriage is clean, she said: God will reward you. But last night in a dream—”
Ah, he thinks, you see her too: Anna Bolena with her collar of blood.
Henry says: “Did I do right?”
Right? The magnitude of the question checks him, like a hand on his arm. Was I just? No. Was I prudent? No. Did I do the best thing for my country? Yes.
“It’s done,” he says.
“But how can you say, ‘It’s done’? As if there were no sin? As if there were no repentance?”
“Go forward, sir. It’s the one direction God permits. The queen will give you a son. Your treasury is filling. Your laws are observed. All Europe sees and admires the stand you have taken against the pretended authority of Rome.” (33-4)
Cromwell, like the king, is haunted by the dead queen whose execution he conspired to bring about, along with those of five courtiers he convinced the king were both cuckolding him and devising his overthrow.
The king turned a blind eye to Cromwell’s machinations because he wanted to be free to marry Jane Seymour; the other men were collateral damage. The faux investigation, the multiple interrogations, and the farcical—but deadly serious—trials that resulted in all these executions take up the bulk of the action in Bring up the Bodies. But they follow a pattern we first see in Wolf Hall, as Cromwell connives to bring about the conviction and execution of Thomas More, a man he simultaneously despises and admires, for the crime of not acknowledging the king’s supremacy over the pope. Some of the most beautiful scenes in Wolf Hall have Cromwell, often in the midst of a conversation with More, struggling with what he must do. We as readers look on wondering how he’ll be able to live with the burden of guilt—only to pick up the next novel and find that he’s going to have to do much worse. Before ever cracking the cover of The Mirror and the Light, we knew it wouldn’t be a story of hubris and nemesis; it’s a story about sin and redemption.
I’ll make one final concession to Mendelsohn: the hubris theme really is there to be found in The Mirror and the Light. The obvious point Mendelsohn misses, though, is that this is the story Cromwell’s enemies, particularly the nobles who hate to see anyone lowborn rising so high, want to foist on him. “There is a proverb,” the Countess Margaret Pole says to him, “the truth of which is hallowed by time. ‘He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.’” Cromwell will have none of it: “A feeble saying, and feebly expressed. It leans on the same conceit, the wheel. What I say is, these are new times. New engines drive them” (204). Of course, Pole is vindicated in the end (if only after her own fall from grace). But even as he awaits his own execution in the Tower, Cromwell reframes the traditional tale:
He lays the book aside and turns the pages of his engravings. He sees Icarus, his wings melting, plummeting into the waves. It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over the walls, skimming the ocean so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths: and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life. (742)
These lines allude to an earlier instance of Cromwell’s musing, this one following a warning from another noble.
He thinks of the wings he wears; or so he boasted to Francis Bryan. When the wings of Icarus melted, he fell soundless through the air and into the water; he went in with a whisper, and feathers floated on the surface, on the flat and oily sea. Why do we blame Daedalus for the fall, and only remember his failures? He invented the saw, the hatchet and the plumbline. He built the Cretan labyrinth. (133)
Lines like these are what Mendelsohn is referring to when he complains that the hubris theme is “too intermittent.” This is supposedly how “Mantel tries hard to make it work.” Since each of these passages has Cromwell himself rejecting the myth’s application, and since the novel is centered on Cromwell’s perspective, Mendelsohn might have inferred that Mantel only touches the theme—inevitable, to some degree, given Cromwell’s “trajectory”—so that her protagonist can let us know the story’s true “morals and meanings” are to be found elsewhere. What we discover in these passages is that Cromwell sees himself not as an aspirant to higher authority but as an inventor, engineering machines to drive a new world, and, in point of fact, he was.
What would that new world look like? In other words, what higher vision could possibly justify Cromwell’s horrific transgressions, at least in his own mind? In a scene that has him debating theology—works versus election—with a prior named Barnes he met while serving Cardinal Wolsey, he gives an impassioned description of what he’s up to.
“Works follow from election,” Barnes says. “They do not precede it. It is simple enough. The man who is saved will show it, by his Christian life.”
“Do you think I am saved?” he says. “I am covered in lamp black and my hands smell of coin, and when I see myself in a glass I see grime—I suppose that is the beginning of wisdom? About my fallen state, I have no choice but agree. I must meddle with matters that corrupt—it is my office. In the golden age the earth yielded all we required, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it. There must be dinners cooked, Rob. There must be slates chalked, and ink set to page, and money made and bargains struck, and we must give the poor the means to work and eat. I bear in mind that there are cities abroad where the magistrates have done much good, with setting up hospitals, relieving the indigent, helping young tradesmen with loans to get a wife and a workshop. I know Luther turns his face from what ameliorates our sad condition. But citizens do not miss monks and their charity, if the city looks after them. And I believe, I do believe, that a man who serves the commonweal and does his duty gets a blessing for it, and I do not believe—”
He breaks off, before the magnitude of what he does not believe. “I sin,” he says, “I repent, I lapse, I sin again, I repent and I look to Christ to perfect my imperfection. I cling to faith but I will not give up works. My master Wolsey taught me, try everything. Discard no possibility. Keep all channels open.” (223-4)
What we see in this passage is that what Mendelsohn treats as mere background historical happenstance is for Cromwell the key to his salvation. Later, he reflects on the durability of the changes he’s helped to bring about:
So even after Henry dies, he thinks, our work is safe. After a generation, the name of Pope itself will be blotted out of memory, and no one will ever believe we bowed to stocks of wood and prayed to plaster. The English will see God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense; they will hear his word from a minister who faces them, instead of turning his back and muttering in a foreign tongue. We will have good-living clergy, who counsel the ignorant and help the unfortunate, instead of a scum of half-literate monks squatting in the dust with their cassocks hauled up, playing knucklebones for farthings and trying to see up women’s skirts. We will have an end to images, the simpering saints with their greensick faces, and Christ with the wound in his side gaping like a whore’s gash. The faithful will cherish their Saviour in their inner heart, instead of gawping at him painted above their heads, like a swinging inn sign. We will break the shrines, Hugh Latimer says, and found schools. Turn out the monks and buy horn books, alphabet books for little hands. We will draw out the living God from his false depictions. God is not his gown, he is not his coat, he is not shreds of flesh or nails or thorns. He is not trapped in a jewelled monstrance or in a window’s glass. But dwells in the human heart. Even in the Duke of Norfolk’s. (231-2)
The meeting with Barnes takes place in secret, and throughout all three novels we see that Cromwell’s advocacy for Protestantism extends far beyond what he can safely reveal to the king. This is in part the impetus behind many of the sentiments that seem to intimate his hubris. Even Mendelsohn caught on that “it’s highly unlikely that Cromwell ever intended to depose Henry,” but readers know the councillor’s and the king’s goals are less than perfectly aligned.
Now we can see the central thread that ties together so many historical episodes. The uprising in the north known as the Pilgrimage of Grace was in response to Cromwell’s efforts to shut down monasteries and rob the people of their saints and feast days. The death of Jane Seymour threatened to make Henry question the righteousness of his turning away from Rome. The failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves meant that he might marry someone less eager to embrace Protestantism—a point that Mendelsohn appreciates but fails to grasp the significance of because he betrays no understanding of what such an embrace means to Cromwell. At one point, Cromwell refers to his efforts to get the Bible translated into English for his countrymen as his “life’s work” (545). Before Cromwell’s execution, it was already widely suspected that Henry would go on to marry Katherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Norfolk was not enthused about the religious reform taking place in England.
Oddly, Mendelsohn does pick up on part of this dynamic—at least in the earlier books. He writes about how Mantel presents Cromwell as “an increasingly haunted man who finds it ever more difficult to extricate himself from the moral implications of his sophisticated political maneuvering.” But he explains it away as if it were merely the author’s attempt to make her protagonist more sympathetic before going back to his search for a Greco-Roman theme to serve as the key to unlock the whole novel. He goes on to suggest the title refers to Cromwell’s mistaking himself for the light, when in fact he could only be the mirror to Henry. But that would assume that Mantel wished for her readers to accept the king’s authority as truly natural and God-given, when in reality one of the main sources of dramatic tension in all three novels is that everyone, Cromwell first and foremost, must pretend Henry is something other than a cruel, short-tempered, and mercurial narcissist, as apt to run the country into the ground in service of his own vanity as to bring about any new and more just world. (Mendelsohn tacitly endorsing the elitism of the nobility is an amusing irony.) It’s not hubris that keeps poking up in Cromwell’s speech and behavior; it’s honesty. And his increasing inability or unwillingness to dissemble what he knows is part of the same complacency and resignation that throughout the novel should have pointed Mendelsohn back to Cromwell’s conscience getting the better of him.
Mendelsohn also might have noticed, as Merritt does, that Mantel sneaks an allusion to a mirror into the opening scene of the novel, as Cromwell accepts the sword from Anne’s executioner to examine it. On it, he finds etched a crown of thorns and an inscription. Only we don’t find out what the inscription says until later in the novel. Cromwell recalls it even as he’s kneeling for his own execution on the second to the last page.
After Anne’s swift end he had spoken with the headsman; he read the words engraved on the blade. Speculum justitiae, ora pro nobis. They don’t write words on the head of an axe. (753)
The Latin phrase translates, “Mirror of justice, pray for us.” In a sense, then, the entire story is bookended with references to the sword used to kill Anne Boleyn. It serves as a kind of repeated slap to Cromwell’s face, since, as we know, the sword was in nowise used to mete out justice. When one of the leaders of the northern rebellion comes to negotiate with Henry, the theme is reprised. Henry says that Robert Aske “will see that I am a monarch both generous and just,” prompting Cromwell to think:
The only danger—and we cannot get around it—is that Aske will also see that Henry is not the puissant warrior of ten years ago, and he will carry word back to Yorkshire. The king wishes to be known as Henry, Mirror of Justice. But perhaps he will be known as Henry the Bad Leg. (332)
Cromwell himself doesn’t ever address Henry with this phrase. You could even say he comes up with the phrase that makes up the title so he doesn’t have to recognize him as an arbiter of truth or morality. When it comes time to flatter Henry, he says, “What should I want with the Emperor, were he the emperor of the entire world? Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.” (467)
With the theme of sin and redemption in mind, the scenes that Mendelsohn complains failed to hold his attention likewise take on new “morals and meanings”. The elaborate court entertainment he cites is deliberately rendered by Mantel as a failure. The drama is meant to impress the new queen Anna, and it has ancient Britons repelling a Roman army. It’s also meant to get both Henry and Anna in the mood for making a new prince. But the queen “looks bewildered” (639), one of the jesters offends both Henry and Cromwell and has to be chased away, and the conversation turns to Cromwell’s son’s skepticism about the glories of the past kings of Albion. After “The queen stands up, at some invisible signal or perhaps some inner prompting” to walk away from the show, Cromwell sees that “Henry’s face shows nothing, except traces of fatigue” (642). For most readers, this is probably a shocking instance of Cromwell’s maneuvers ending in failure. And Cromwell knows it. But Mendelsohn, not appreciating that this spells doom not just for Cromwell himself, but for his mission to reform Christianity, a mission which has already cost him his soul, finds the entire three-page scene tedious and overdone.
What’s with that leopard near the end of the novel though? The metaphorical uses of cats in these novels could supply a graduate student material for multiple theses. Early in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell’s people have to capture an escaped cat from Syria. Cromwell imagines himself as the Damascene Cat, looking down at his pursuers, smugly certain of his own ability to evade them. This is a clear reprisal of the hubris theme, but Mendelsohn makes no mention of it. With the leopard, though, Mantel is up to something else entirely. Again, Cromwell deliberately avoids dwelling on his sins. But Mantel reveals the impact they have on him in myriad ways—some less than subtle. Anytime Cromwell is going to bed or dreaming or feverish, or even just alone in a house, he encounters those ghosts Mendelsohn is so perplexed by. At the close of Part One, for instance, Cromwell wanders around one of his empty houses, musing,
Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slop into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well; must I apply to Bishop Stephen, who will tell me how transgression follows me, assures me that my sins seek me out; even as I slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a basin of alabaster, cool in the heat of the Florentine afternoon. (212)
With this passage, Mantel is pointing us back to the metaphorical conceit in Bring up the Bodies that Cromwell was rewriting Anne’s life, transforming her from what she really was into what he needed her to be, a cheating wife with murderous intentions. Later in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell suffers the same fate at someone else’s hands: “Dorothea has rewritten his story” (247). Dorothea is Wosley’s daughter, and in this scene she’s just turned Cromwell’s failure to save his beloved cardinal into a deliberate betrayal. And there’s no convincing her she’s been misled.
But it’s those last lines of the passage that provide us with a clue as to what Mantel is doing with the leopard, the ones about how transgression follows him. Here’s how the scene when the leopard is delivered comes to an end.
Until now the beast was torpid. Now it stands up, and in the cramped fetid space it stretches itself. It takes a pace forward, and that pace brings it to the limits of its freedom, and it stares at him, at him; its eyes are sunk deeply into its folds of fur, so you cannot see its expression, whether awe, or fear, or rage.
There is quiet. Dick says uneasily, “It knows its master.”
As an arrow its target. He feels pierced by its scrutiny: thin as it is, a walking pelt. (607).
This scene takes place near the end of the novel, when Cromwell will soon be made to answer for crimes he never committed, as he discovers again, “They are rewriting my life” (717). A character being made to suffer the same fate he’s made others suffer is a staple of redemption stories.
As for the visit to baby Elizabeth that Mendelsohn found so pointless, we need only point out that this is Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the same Anne Boleyn Cromwell had executed for having multiple affairs, and it’s not just in her crankiness that the child resembles a character we’re acquainted with. Mary Shelton, Anne’s cousin and the child’s nursemaid, comes right out and says, “I think she’s Henry’s. You should hear her bawl. Had any of Anne’s gentlemen red hair?” It should also be noted that Cromwell isn’t just there to visit Elizabeth; his main purpose is to meet with another of Henry’s daughters, Mary. Later we’ll find out that Cromwell promised Mary’s mother, Queen Katherine, that he would take care of her. The whole first part of The Mirror and the Light centers on Cromwell’s efforts to persuade Mary to accept that her parents were never truly married and that her father, not the pope, is the true head of the church in England. If he fails, she too could be executed.
Now, why would Cromwell want to help the daughter of a queen whose reign he was so instrumental in bringing to an end? And why doesn’t Mendelsohn see that there’s more to Cromwell than hubris and Machiavellian self-interest?
What about all those flashbacks and repetitive repetitions Mendelsohn groans about? By now, I don’t think there’s any need to go into much detail here. So let me point to some clues to the scenes’ significance. One of the scenes has him recalling a time when his dad recruited him to take part in some crime. “Father, do you not know right from wrong?” he says.
Walter’s face grew dark. But he said in a tone mild in the circumstances, “Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I’m sure life will instruct you, by and by, if your father’s precept and example can’t get it through your skull.” (298)
Later in the novel, as Cromwell faces his own death, Kingston, the constable of the Tower, asks him if he would like a priest for confession. Cromwell responds,
“It is not long since I confessed, and I have had scant opportunity of sin since I came here.”
“That is not it.” Kingston is disconcerted. “You are meant to pass your whole life in review, and discover new sins each time.”
“I know that,” he says. “I know how to do it. I live here with Thomas More.” (743)
Okay, one of the main themes of the novel is sin and redemption, but I’ve acknowledged that hubris is also present throughout the story. And, as Mendelsohn stresses, it’s a long book. Maybe he and I are simply quoting selectively to paint our opposing pictures. But this just isn’t the case. The stretches of the novel where you don’t come across some clue to Cromwell’s tortured soul over more than a few pages are rare. Meanwhile, there are only a handful of instances where hubris comes up—as Mendelsohn himself admits. One last block quote should adequately illustrate the point, as you only have to turn a couple pages from the front cover to find it. It’s the scene that takes place just after Anne’s execution, and Cromwell is criticizing Kingston for not having a casket ready for her body. The duke Charles Brandon can’t resist piping up.
“I’d have put her on a dunghill,” Brandon says. “And the brother underneath her. And I’d have made their father witness it. I don’t know what you are about, Cromwell. Why did you leave him alive to work mischief?”
He turns on him, angry: often, anger is what he fakes. “My lord Suffolk, you have often offended the king yourself, and begged his pardon on your knees. And being what you are, I have no doubt you will offend again. What then? Do you want a king to whom the notion of mercy is foreign? If you love the king, and you say you do, pay some heed to his soul. One day he will stand before God and answer for every subject. If I say Thomas Boleyn is no danger to the realm, he is no danger. If I say he will live quiet, that is what he will do.”
The courtiers tramping across the green eye them: Suffolk with his big beard, his flashing eye, his big chest, and Master Secretary subfusc, low-slung, square. Warily, they separate and flow around the quarrel, reuniting in chattering parties at the other side.
“By God,” Brandon says. “You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the realm? And you, from the place where you come from?”
“I stand just where the king has put me. I will read you any lesson you should learn.”
He thinks, Cromwell, what are you doing? Usually, he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?
He glances sideways at his son. We are three years older, less a month, than at Anne’s coronation. Some of us are wiser; some of us are taller. Gregory had said he cannot do it, when told he should witness her death: “I cannot. A woman. I cannot.” But his boy has kept his face arranged and his tongue governed. Each time you are in public, he has told Gregory, know that people are observing you, to see if you are fit to follow me in the king’s service. (5-6)
Mantel juxtaposes Gregory’s behavior with Cromwell’s to demonstrate that the father is breaking his own rules. This is that complacency that rears up in him throughout the novel. Mendelsohn reads this scene as evidence of hubris—just as Brandon does. But you don’t have to read too closely to see that Cromwell was already on edge, that he couldn’t take any more aspersions being cast on the poor woman whose life was just cut short, thanks to his own machinations.
I’m going hard after Mendelsohn here because he went so hard after Mantel and her fans (including this one)—based on a ridiculous misreading of her work. But his embrace of an arcane theory that all but guarantees precisely this kind of misreading is unfortunately not the least bit out of the ordinary. You could say there’s a massive epistemic crisis in the field of literary theory and criticism. What’s most disheartening about this situation, though, is that this crisis has been baked into the practice for decades. Critics don’t want any system of accountability. They want their work to be more art than science. This is why they eschew empirical approaches and opt instead for bizarre philosophies like psychoanalysis and deconstructionism—or lately activist ideologies like intersectionalism. Part of this is an understandable fear of reductionism, though that threat is wildly exaggerated. But another part of it is that without anything resembling an objective account of what fiction is and how it operates, critics get to say whatever they want. Mendelsohn’s enviable mastery of the English language’s highest register, along with his staff position with the august New Yorker, means that he can say some outrageously stupid shit without taking a hit to his reputation. But his status should not distract anyone from the fact that, when it comes to modern fiction, especially novels like The Mirror and the Light, the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (Still, I should say I can’t help liking the dude; his book An Odyssey is on my reading list.)
Is The Mirror and the Light as good as Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies? Both of those first two books grabbed me and thrust me into Cromwell’s world, forcing me to wrestle with the dilemmas he faces. The third book didn’t take hold of me in the same way; its invitation is much more subtle. In many ways, The Mirror and the Light is more demanding than the other two books. But unlike Mendelsohn, I felt my own efforts were handsomely repaid. The Cromwell of the earlier novels is a bracing inspiration. The Cromwell of The Mirror and the Light is more recognizable, more relatable. Now we see Cromwell not as a marvel but as a mere mortal. Hubris or no, all of us are heading for a fall. The story of the elder Cromwell is closer to reality. It’s sadder, more tragic than exhilarating. It has to be. And yet it comes with a message of hope. If we’re all heading for a fall regardless, why not reach for the heavens. Cromwell, awaiting his execution, stands in awe of what he’s managed to accomplish: “This is going to work.” And it did work, even if Cromwell was no longer around to see it.
Does Mantel’s protagonist achieve the redemption he seeks throughout the novel? I won’t venture an answer, but I will say if you keep that question in mind as you read the book from beginning to end, you’ll come away with a much richer understanding of the work, and you’ll get much more pleasure from it, than the great Daniel Mendelsohn did.
Also read:
WHAT MAKES "WOLF HALL" SO GREAT?
PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE
