![]() ![]() Cromwell retains his ruthlessness, yet Mantel’s admiration for him (as in Wolf Hall ) runs through that ruthlessness like a vein of ore. The England in which he moves is diminished, sadder. In Bring Up The Bodies, Mantel’s Cromwell is darkened by years of service to an irascible King, beleaguered by the accumulation of private griefs, chiefly over the death from plague of his wife and daughters. This second novel is at once leaner and grimmer than Wolf Hall, which won (among other illustrious awards) Britain’s Man Booker Prize in 2009. ![]() ![]() introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed” (6). will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and. Mantel’s Cromwell is a penetrating and unsettling portrait of a man who “has a way of getting his way. This is not a novel about Queen Anne, however, so much as a continuation of Mantel’s dynamic portrait of the man in charge of underwriting her doom, Thomas Cromwell. We follow an Anne Boleyn reduced in power-“her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places” (36)-to one encircled, tried, and eventually executed, flattened to a “puddle of gore” (397). Bring Up The Bodies, the second in Mantel’s trilogy of Tudor novels, spans the death of one spurned Queen (Katherine) and the execution of another. Hilary Mantel’s sixteenth century shimmers with ghosts. ![]()
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