83interview. “I don’t have pages and pages in which I say
Cromwell thought. I tell you what he says, I tell you
what he does, and you read between the lines.”
This is not quite true. Cromwell thinks a great deal
in those novels, but mostly about the business at hand.
The Cromwell of The Mirror & the Light, though, is
just as likely to be found ruminating and soliloquiz-
ing. His subjects include the past; his revered fellow
reformer William Tyndale, the great Bible translator
burned as a heretic; himself. Mostly, though, he thinks
about the dead, especially those whose deaths he is
responsible for. Cromwell dreams of Anne Boleyn
as a Christ figure: Her severed head leaves its bloody
imprint on the linen it’s wrapped in, as if the cloth
were the Shroud of Turin. George Boleyn, Anne’s late
brother, weighs on Cromwell, literally. When Crom-
well interrogates a prisoner in the Tower, George’s
spirit intercepts and grabs onto Cromwell, “head
heavy on his shoulder, tears seeping into his linen
and leaving a residual salt damp that lasts till he can
change his shirt.” People in the 16th century believed
in ghosts, but they are so real to him, it’s as if he has
crossed over into their world. I take this to be the
figurative expression of a death wish—an appropri-
ate affliction, given the atrocities he has committed.
Mantel changes her prose style to accommodate
her more haunted Cromwell. In the earlier novels, the
sentences were blunt and propulsive; in this one, she
slows them down, unlaces them. The language is more
elegiac, almost mystical, though as precise as ever. It
now has to trace the wavering edges of a once well-
defined self. The dissolution of Cromwell coincides
with his unmooring in time. Past and future flow into
the present. Cromwell flows with them. One moment
he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled
into the sphere of the angels. Indeed, the afterlife occa-
sions some of the loveliest writing in this beautifully
written book. Cromwell wonders how he’ll recognize
his own lost loved ones on the day of his judgment,
but just when he needs to, he knows:
He sees how they are visible, and how they shine.
They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There
is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed
with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten
with God’s grace.As Mantel brings her series to a close, she makes it
almost obsessively reflective—a word that is impos-
sible to avoid. Mirrors are not just in the title of this
novel; they’re all over the place. Cromwell tells the
king that he’s the “mirror and the light of other kings”
(he’s lying, of course). Henry owns more than 100
looking glasses, peering into them in an attempt to
catch a glimpse of the handsome prince he used to
be. Doubling is one of the dominant themes of the
novel. Cromwell serves as the king’s alter ego, but
that’s one refraction among many. Cromwell’s pres-
ent begins to echo his past; old figures reappear in
new guises. Henry, for instance, becomes a version
of Cromwell’s abusive father. Oddly but aptly, in this
novel, Cromwell’s doubles are feline. One is especially
disturbing: a starving, caged leopard anonymously
deposited in his courtyard. And Mantel has a double
too, of course—Cromwell.
Mantel doesn’t indulge in overt self-reflexivity,
but one scene midway through the novel could be
read as catching her in the act of, well, reflecting on
the process of creation. The setting is eerie. Dusk has
arrived in the countryside, “when earth and sky melt”
and “the eyes of cats shine in the dark.” Inside, where
Cromwell sits, “colour bleeds from sleeve and gown
into the darkening air.” The imagery turns bookish,
then dreamlike: “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.”
Cromwell re commences his incessant dialogue with
his selves, the present and the half-remembered, the
imagined and the unbounded. His train of thought
reminds the reader that Cromwell is also his own
author, having fashioned a high minister out of the
unlikely material of a ruffian from the streets.
With a novelist’s wonderment at a character who
defies understanding, Cromwell sees that he can’t solve
the riddle of himself. “You look back into your past
and say, is this story mine?,” he thinks, and Mantel
could be brooding alongside him: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 eter-
nity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself,
undone myself, have I forgotten too well?Yes to all of the above. By the end of these three
books, we have been with Cromwell as he lived or
revisited most of his life, and we haven’t exhausted his
mystery. Nor, obviously, has he. It is a testament to
Mantel’s demiurgic imagination, her ability to mul-
tiply ambiguities, that by the time Cromwell achieves
something like self-knowledge, there is more to him
than it is possible to know.Judith Shulevitz is the author of The Sabbath World:
Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.BOOKS