80 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
GREAT MATTER
Hilary Mantel concludes her Tudor trilogy.BY DANIELMENDELSOHNABOVE: SERGE BLOCH
I
n the opening pages of Hilary Man-
tel’s 1994 novel, “A Change of Cli-
mate,” a woman in a railway car-
riage stares disapprovingly at the cover
of the cheesy paperback her travelling
companion is reading. It’s clearly a work
of historical fiction, the archly period
title, “Wyfe to Crookback,” traced in
“florid gold script.” (The “wyfe” in ques-
tion is Anne Neville, unhappy queen to
the legendarily hunchbacked Rich-
ard III.) Although the woman, Emma,
is a physician, she evidently knows a
thing or two about late-Plantagenet do-
mestic architecture; as she examines the
cover art, she notes that the manor house
behind the heroine (“a svelte woman,
with a small crown perched upon her
wimple”) has “anachronistic chimney
stacks.” The vulgar font, the clueless art
work, even the “fat” paperback’s size,
with its intimation of a future at the
beach: all this is meant to indict the
middlebrow taste of Emma’s fellow-pas-
senger, Ginny, a posh neighbor who
happens to be the wyfe of Emma’s lover.
Getting the past right—or wrong—
has always been a theme in Mantel’s
fiction, much of which features charac-
ters who, like Emma and Ginny, strug-
gle to come to terms with histories they’d
rather not talk about. But it’s hard, now,
not to read the “Wyfe to Crookback”
episode as being prophetic. From 1985,
when she published her first book, until
about ten years ago, Mantel earned ad-
miration for a string of strikingly idio-
syncratic works of fiction, most of them
about modern people in contemporary
settings, and for her numerous essays
and reviews in publications like The New
York Review of Books. But she achieved
celebrity only after she committed her-
self to the genre and the period that she
pokes fun at in that scene on the train.
The publication, in 2009, of “Wolf Hall,”
whose protagonist was Henry VIII’s
brilliant consigliere, Thomas Cromwell,
and of its sequel, “Bring Up the Bod-
ies,” in 2012—a series that, with the re-
lease this week of “The Mirror and the
Light” (Henry Holt), has become a tril-
ogy—has brought Mantel a degree of
popular success that is rare for authors
of serious literary fiction. (The first two
novels were adapted to great acclaim for
both stage and television, further ex-
panding her audience.) Anticipation for
her latest Tudor offering has been run-
ning high: at a Waterstones bookstore
in London last August, banners urging
customers to preorder it were already
fluttering above the shelves.
Such popularity has partly to do
with the period itself. With its wild
extremes—the high color and low mo-
tives, the befeathered courtiers and bar-
becued clerics, the oversexed kings and
Virgin Queens, the (sometimes literally)
outsized monarchs whose erotic whims
or neuroses could trigger global cri-
ses—the Tudor era has exercised a pow-
erful fascination on artistic imaginations
for centuries. There have been tsunamis
of novels, from Sir Walter Scott, in the
early nineteenth century, and Jean
Plaidy, in the mid-twentieth (“Kath-
arine, the Virgin Widow,” “The Captive
Queen of Scots,” etc.), to best-selling
authors today such as Philippa Greg-
ory or C. J. Sansom, whose lovelorn
hero, a hunchbacked lawyer, solves
mysteries emanating from the court
of Henry VIII. Dramatizations haverun the gamut from Friedrich Schil-
ler’s 1800 verse drama “Maria Stuart,”
about the conflict between the epony-
mous Queen of Scots and her cousin
Elizabeth I—roles later coveted by
Sarah Bernhardt, Bette Davis, Katha-
rine Hepburn, Glenda Jackson, and
Saoirse Ronan, to name just a few—to
the glossy Netflix series “The Tudors,”
in which Henry and his courtiers were
impersonated by what appeared to be
underwear models. There were even
operas. The nineteenth-century Italian
composer Gaetano Donizetti composed
three: “Anna Bolena,” “Roberto Dev-
ereux,” and “Maria Stuarda.”
Because of Mantel’s literary bona
fides, no one was likely to confuse her
entries into this crowded field with the
kind of stuff that the woman is reading
on the train. But the question of how
to approach historical fiction has clearly
haunted the author. There’s a scene in
“Wolf Hall” in which Cromwell, rem-
iniscing about his shady past in Italy,
recalls the time he scammed a gullible
cardinal into buying a fake antique:
“Well, we had a statue made, a smirking
little god with wings, and then we beat it with
hammers and chains to make it antique, and
we hired a muleteer and drove it to Rome and
sold it to a cardinal ... I remember he had
tears in his eyes when he paid us. ‘To think
that on these charming little feet and these
sweet pinions, the gaze of the Emperor Au-
gustus may have rested.’ When the Portinari
boys set off for Florence they were staggering
under the weight of their purses.”
“And you?”
“I took my cut and stayed on to sell the
mules.”How do you make a new work feel
old? In fiction, one way—what you