The frantic glances exchanged over her head are so visually perfect – “Edward looks desperate. 12/15 Anton Lesser continues the finale to Hilary Mantel's acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series. From the first page of Wolf Hall, when we saw through the eyes of 15-year-old Thomas as he lay bleeding on the Putney cobbles, watching his father’s boot as Walter yelled “So now get up”, we were always going to share that perspective again as his head rested on the executioner’s block. “When I first read the opening pages of Wolf Hall, I was drawn into history in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Mantel’s ghosts embody the histories that we can’t bury. The final installment of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy is a reminder that a history is not the same as a story. Frances is one of a number of Mantel’s female characters who must struggle to make themselves believed.

(By the end of the trilogy, the King—“a man of great endowments, lacking only in consistency, reason and sense”—has come to embody the irrational forces that Cromwell has always tried to combat and that Mantel has always probed.). Taken together, those first two volumes function as a dark diptych, a portrait of an increasingly haunted man who finds it ever more difficult to extricate himself from the moral implications of his sophisticated political maneuvering. These books are precision-engineered, and none more so than The Mirror and the Light. Mantel portrays her as a lonely, stubborn young woman, inviting pity but not sympathy, one moment giving in to emotional outbursts, the next desperately trying to assume the lofty dignity of a princess. “A Place of Greater Safety” is a work of historical fiction that entwines the lives of three leaders of the Revolution—Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre—from their childhoods until their early deaths at the hands of the movement they created.

Inevitably, blame falls on Cromwell. Access exclusive energy deals! You can unsubscribe at any time. The irrepressible dead torment her as mercilessly now as they did when they were alive: when Alison was a child, we learn, they raped and tortured her. By Hilary Mantel. (Muriel’s mother abuses her because she thinks she’s saving the girl from evil spirits that inhabit their house.)

Throughout the trilogy, there’s a chilling pleasure in observing Cromwell as he weaves verbal webs around his hapless prey. It’s a bit like making a documentary: you shoot a lot of scenes, and then work out how to put them all together in the cutting room. These include stretches of sumptuous prose; something about the Tudor milieu has brought greater amplitude and gorgeousness to Mantel’s style. In many of her novels, the border between reality and unreality, sanity and madness, is as fuzzy as the one between past and present, truth and lies. Mantel's twelfth novel, her first in almost eight years, The Mirror & The Light was … She replied emphatically: “Yes,” almost before he had finished the question. England needs a legitimate heir, so Thomas Cromwell is keen to hear how the wedding night went. When Jo Tiegan is given a mirror as a gift by the elderly owner of an antique shop, she is amazed to see another girl's image in the mirror instead of her own reflection. 5/15 Anton Lesser reads the finale of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Thomas Cromwell series. You can write a new story.

The Mirror & The Light is a historical novel by English writer Hilary Mantel. And this is where Mantel’s supreme artistry is most evident: she creates suspense and apprehension where none should exist. 11/15 Anton Lesser continues the long-awaited finale to Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series, 10/15 Anton Lesser reads the final book of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Thomas Cromwell series. The new puzzles website is now live - sign up now and enjoy a 7-day free trial! Anton Lesser continues the final part of Hilary Mantel's acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series. “He thinks, you have destroyed one queen, is one enough?” Later, we meet flirty, teenage Katherine Howard, destined to become the second of Henry’s wives to be beheaded, along with Lady Rochford, who arranged her adulterous trysts. In “Bring Up the Bodies,” when Henry needs to get rid of Anne, Cromwell once again tracks down poor Percy, this time in order to intimidate him into retracting that oath—a hypocrisy at which Percy, to his credit, balks: “You made me a liar as I stood before God. . It follows Wolf Hall (2009), which charted Cromwell’s rise to greatness, and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), covering the machinations that led to Boleyn’s beheading.

? He was executed in July, 1540, for treason and heresy, after his enemies among the old nobility succeeded in convincing the ever more paranoid Henry that he was aiming to depose him and take the throne.

Kick off time, live stream and latest team news, See James Corden and Meryl Streep in "zazzy" Netflix musical The Prom. The things we wanted have not happened.”. Anton Lesser reads the finale to Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Thomas Cromwell series.

What interests her are the half-truths, evasions, and self-delusions that people cling to, often at great cost, in order to get through their (usually grim) lives.

With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of; she has given it muscle and sinew, enlarged its scope, and created a prose style that is lyrical and colloquial, at once faithful to its time and entirely recognisable to us. It’s impossible not to miss Anne Boleyn; the force of her ambition, and the savage verbal sparring that she enjoyed with Cromwell. One way to think of the book’s title is, indeed, to see it as illustrating a fatal confusion: Cromwell, the mirror, has mistaken himself for the light, which can only be Henry. “I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern,” Ralph Eldred reflects in “A Change of Climate,” speaking for many of the author’s characters. Each volume elegantly mirrored the other’s structure, a symmetry that foregrounded the ironies of history and the complexities of Mantel’s Cromwell.

of 15, Tim Burton plans to reboot The Addams Family as live-action TV series, What channel is Man Utd v Chelsea on? Erm... grabbing lunch and saw this in Leicester Sq! Anton Lesser continues the finale to Hilary Mantel's acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series. Things I never imagined a wife had to do.”, There is nothing sentimental in Cromwell’s end, only the most devastating humanity, leaving the reader with stopped breath and a sense of amazement that the real world is continuing outside. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. In what may be Mantel’s masterpiece, “Beyond Black” (2005), a creamily luscious prose stands in disconcerting contrast to the bizarrenesses and horrors it narrates. No, why would I?” said the author. Small wonder that Mantel has returned so often to the supernatural— ghosts, in particular. At the time of the split from Catherine and Rome, Henry’s Lord Chancellor was the scholar, theologian, and statesman Sir Thomas More, who was eventually executed for protesting the new religious and political arrangements that Cromwell effected. How do you make a new work feel old? 14/15 Anton Lesser continues the finale to Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Thomas Cromwell series. All rights reserved. . All; Available now (0) Next on (0) Episode 15: Ghosts. It is expected to cover the last few years of Cromwell’s life, from Anne Boleyn’s death to his own execution in 1540.

The darkness of her themes and the rebarbative strangeness of the narratives in which she clothed them may not have won her international fandom, but they bespeak a genuine and bracing originality.

He is our way.” Such offhand remarks will come back to haunt him, twisted and used against him just as he has twisted the innocent words of others. Throughout “The Mirror and the Light,” you feel the effort of the author’s attempts to stop that story sliding from her grip. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories.

Anton Lesser reads the finale to Hilary Mantel's award-winning Thomas Cromwell series. . There’s something familiar about the cruelly efficient machinery of state intimidation that Cromwell is shown operating so brilliantly. Set in the nineteen-eighties, it unfolds the story of a British couple, Anna and Ralph Eldred, who were the victims of a horrific act of violence when they were newlyweds working for a missionary society in southern Africa, in the fifties—a crime triggered when Anna carelessly offends an employee.