Entertainment Weekly - 04.2020

EDITED BY → DAVID CANFIELD @DAVIDCANFIELD97

Privy Seal and Master of the Rolls;

unofficially, his job fell somewhere

between fixer, enforcer, and CEO.

But being consigliere to a king took

on new significance when the mon-

arch, eager to shed his first wife and

marry another, essentially altered

the course of Christianity in his

pursuit of a legal annulment. It was

Cromwell who helped engineer it—

spurring Great Britain’s break from

the Pope in Rome and the creation

of the Church of England.

Though Henry, famously, failed

to stop at a second bride. So Mirror

begins where Bodies left off, with

the unlucky end of Anne Boleyn and

this memorable sentence: “Once

the queen’s head is severed, he walks

away.” Mantel hardly flinches from

the bare facts of flesh—childbirth,

beheadings, more ordinary “ill

TRIPLE CROWN

THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT, THE FINAL BOOK IN

HILARY MANTEL’S WOLF HALL SERIES, CONCLUDES THE

GLOBAL LITERARY PHENOMENON OF THE DECADE

By Leah Greenblatt

statesman Thomas Cromwell, first

via 2009’s epic door-stopper Wolf

Hall, then with her nominally slim-

mer 2012 follow-up, Bring Up the

Bodies. Now comes one last cinder

block: its maddening, fascinating

conclusion, The Mirror & the Light.

Cromwell’s rise from rural black-

smith’s son to the royal court of

Henry VIII reads as both wildly

improbable and inevitable: Officially,

he held several titles, including Lord

LIFE IS SHORT, AND BOOKS CAN BE

so long. What modern reader has

the analog attention span for nearly

2,000 pages of historical fiction—

let alone the kind of knotty political

intrigue that contains only distant

war, scant sex, and no White Walk-

ers, wizards, or dragons at all?

Millions, it turns out, found

themselves falling happily head-

first into Hilary Mantel’s rich

reimagining of real-life 16th-century

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE TOFANELLI

APRIL2020.BOOKS1.LO.A.indd 86 FINAL 3/3/20 8:34 AM