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be the matter of an entire novel. We
get the popular uprising known as the
Pilgrimage of Grace; the brief queen-
ship 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 phys-
ically 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.
To be sure, this huge canvas, expertly
painted as always, offers many of the
pleasures you’ve come to expect of Man-
tel and her Cromwell books. These in-
clude stretches of sumptuous prose;
something about the Tudor milieu has
brought greater amplitude and gor-
geousness to Mantel’s style. Through-
out, there are swoony passages that—
like certain Dutch paintings of the
century after Cromwell’s—exult in cat-
aloguing the material richness of a so-
ciety newly confident in itself: the food
and the fabrics, the jewels and the spices,
the meats, the tapestries, the wines. As
the narrative of Cromwell’s final years
moves closer to its inevitable conclu-
sion, and as he pauses ever more fre-
quently to consider his achievements,
this opulent style comes to color Man-
tel’s evocation of his autumnal thoughts:
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-walk-
ing animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the
eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour
bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darken-
ing air; when the page grows dim and letter
forms elide and slip 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 ...?
Throughout “The Mirror and the
Light,” you feel the effort of the au-
thor’s attempts to stop that story slid-
ing from her grip. A structure implicit
in the history of Cromwell’s final years
is one that literature has loved to ex-
ploit, and Mantel tries hard to make it
work. If, in the first two books, the pro-
tagonist’s trajectory was an upward one,
the arc in the third is the old Greek
one that goes from hubris to nemesis.
Although it’s highly unlikely that
Cromwell ever intended to depose
Henry, as his accusers maintained,
Mantel effectively suggests the way in
which, as time passed and Henry be-
came increasingly erratic, his minister
may well have become dangerously
overconfident. (By the end of the tril-
ogy, the King—“a man of great endow-
ments, lacking only in consistency, rea-
son and sense”—has come to embody
the irrational forces that Cromwell has
always tried to combat and that Man-
tel has always probed.)
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. Again and again,
Cromwell will let slip a remark that
reveals the perilous delusion that he
is indispensable to his prince. “I should
not have let the king get in my way,”
he remarks of some plan that had come
undone. “My lord,” a shocked associ-
ate retorts, “the king is not in our way.
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.T
he hubris theme is too inter-
mittent, 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 beat-
ings, 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: ThomasMore hovers, as does a talkative Wol-
sey. The past is never past.) But the
gesture fails, and the repetitions feel
merely repetitive.
By the time you get to Cromwell’s
execution—a brilliantly imagined mo-
ment, 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 leop-
ard, and a visit to baby Elizabeth, who’s
cranky because she’s teething; and even
started to wonder—a thought unimag-
inable during my reading of the first
two books—whether this particular his-
torical figure really merits nearly two
thousand pages of fiction.
Toward the end of “Every Day Is
Mother’s Day,” there’s a charged mo-
ment in which Isabel, the social worker,
learns that someone wants to write a
novel based on the disturbed Muriel’s
case file; astonished, she wonders aloud
how and why anyone would want to
do so. “But it’s not a story,” she pro-
tests, “it’s just what people do. It’s just
a record of what they do.” History, too,
in one view, is the record of what peo-
ple have done: Richard Crookback,
Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne
Boleyn. The final installment of the
“Wolf Hall” trilogy is a reminder that
a history is not the same as a story. 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 ap-
petite 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.