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Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Award
The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.
At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head?
Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012 and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012
Author Notes
Hilary Mantel twice won the Booker Prize, for her best-selling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies . The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light , debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. Mantel authored over a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety , Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When last we saw Thomas Cromwell, hero of Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, he'd successfully moved emperors, queens, courtiers, the pope, and Thomas More to secure a divorce and a new, younger queen for his patron, Henry the VIII. Now, in the second book of a planned trilogy, Cromwell, older, tired, with more titles and power, has to get Henry out of another heirless marriage. The historical facts are known: this is not about what happens, but about how. And armed with street smarts, vast experience and connections, a ferociously good memory, and a patient taste for revenge, Mantel's Cromwell is a master of how. Like its predecessor, the book is written in the present tense, rare for a historical novel. But the choice makes the events unfold before us: one wrong move and all could be lost. Also repeated is Mantel's idiosyncratic use of "he:" regardless of the rules of grammar, rest assured "he" is always Cromwell. By this second volume, however, Mantel has taught us how to read her, and seeing Cromwell manipulate and outsmart the nobles who look down on him, while moving between his well-managed domestic arrangements and the murky world of accusations and counteraccusations is pure pleasure. Cromwell may, as we learn in the first volume, look "like a murderer," but he's mighty good company. Agent: Bill Hamilton, A.M. Heath. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Second in Mantel's trilogy charting the Machiavellian trajectory of Thomas Cromwell. The Booker award-winning first volume, Wolf Hall (2009), ended before the titular residence, that of Jane Seymour's family, figured significantly in the life of King Henry VIII. Seeing through Cromwell's eyes, a point of view she has thoroughly assimilated, Mantel approaches the major events slantwise, as Cromwell, charged with the practical details of managing Henry's political and religious agendas, might have. We rejoin the characters as the king's thousand-day marriage to Anne Boleyn is well along. Princess Elizabeth is a toddler, the exiled Queen Katherine is dying, and Henry's disinherited daughter Princess Mary is under house arrest. As Master Secretary, Cromwell, while managing his own growing fortune, is always on call to put out fires at the court of the mercurial Henry (who, even for a king, is the ultimate Bad Boss). The English people, not to mention much of Europe, have never accepted Henry's second marriage as valid, and Anne's upstart relatives are annoying some of Britain's more entrenched nobility with their arrogance and preening. Anne has failed to produce a son, and despite Cromwell's efforts to warn her (the two were once allies of a sort), she refuses to alter her flamboyant behavior, even as Henry is increasingly beguiled by Jane Seymour's contrasting (some would say calculated) modesty. Cromwell, a key player in the annulment of Henry's first marriage, must now find a pretext for the dismantling of a second. Once he begins interrogating, with threats of torture, Anne's male retainers to gather evidence of her adulteries, Mantel has a difficult challenge in keeping up our sympathy for Cromwell. She succeeds, mostly by portraying Cromwell as acutely aware that one misstep could land "him, Cromwell" on the scaffold as well. That misstep will happen, but not in this book. The inventiveness of Mantel's language is the chief draw here; the plot, as such, will engage only the most determined of Tudor enthusiasts.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009) took the literary world by storm and was quickly seen as an exceptional interpretation and depiction of Henry VIII's times and troubles as relayed through the career of Thomas Cromwell, the king's all-powerful secretary and chief task-enforcer. This new novel, the second installment of a planned Cromwell trilogy, can easily stand next to its predecessor as a major achievement in historical fiction. Mantel now tells the story of the fall of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife. As the novel opens, Queen Anne has enjoyed her exalted title for only a short time, but already the winds of change are blowing through the court. The king is tired of her (she hasn't produced a male heir, and her unpleasant personality is wearing thin) and finds lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour a much fresher face. Consequently, Secretary Cromwell, the king's enforcer, steps in, drawing the battle lines between himself and Queen Anne. The conflict will be deadly and, for the reader, edge-of-the-seat gripping. Like its predecessor, this is a rigorous read. One must get used to Mantel's intricate storytelling, and inattention will quickly derail one's grasp of events. Mantel's seductive, almost hypnotic, style is both formal, which is appropriate to the time, and exquisitely fluid, while beautifully articulated dialogue serves the story well, lending depth to characterizations and advancing the rich plot. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Mantel's previous novel won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and appeared on best-seller lists; anticipation for the sequel is high.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HILARY MANTEL belongs to the same generation, roughly, as her compatriots Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, and is every bit their equal. Yet until "Wolf Hall," her historical novel about the reign of Henry VIII, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, she was much less well known in Britain, and in this country she barely registered at all. There may be nonliterary reasons for this: Mantel, who has been in ill health for much of her life, doesn't live in London, doesn't have a posh accent, doesn't travel much, doesn't regularly turn up on the chat shows. But another reason she isn't better known may be that she's a hard novelist to know, or at least to categorize: she's always reinventing herself. Her new book, "Bring Up the Bodies," a sequel to "Wolf Hall," is one of very few Mantel novels that bear much resemblance to any of the others. She has written two earlier historical novels - "A Place of Greater Safety," about the French Revolution, and "The Giant, O'Brien," about an 18th-century Irishman who becomes a scientific curiosity - but also a pair of what might be called political thrillers, set in Saudi Arabia and southern Africa; a couple of black comedies about a woman named Muriel Axon, a murderer and psychopath; and two books that in different ways suggest a Muriel Spark influence: "Fludd," about a Roman Catholic parish whose new curate is the Devil in disguise, and "An Experiment in Love," an hommage of sorts to "The Girls of Slender Means." "Beyond Black," Mantel's last novel before she began the Tudor sequence, was also Sparklike in its surreal description of a character who makes her living summoning forth the spirits of the dead, but it had an amplitude, warmth and generosity very unlike Spark, and its style in turn could not have been less like the sparkling historical realism of "Wolf Hall." Mantel has no consistent, easily identifiable set of novelistic preoccupations - unless it's the persistence of evil in a world that doesn't always recognize it - and no fallback kit of stylistic tricks. There's no such thing as a trademark Mantel sentence. This slippery, protean quality feels almost spooky at times, as if, like Alison Hart, the protagonist of "Beyond Black," she possessed powers not entirely natural. But, reassuringly, "Bring Up the Bodies" takes up exactly where "Wolf Hall" leaves off: its great magic is in making the worn-out story of Henry and his many wives seem fascinating and suspenseful again. When the book opens in the fall of 1535, Henry, wearying of Anne Boleyn, who has failed to supply him with a male heir, already has his eye on shy, dull, flatchested Jane Seymour, for whom even her family doesn't have much use until they see the advantages of being related to the queen. (The new book even helps explain the tide of the old one: Wolf Hall, not a bad description of wherever Henry happens to be, is also the name of the Seymour family seat, to which he and the story have been inexorably heading.) The king's agent for disposing of Anne, just as he disposed of Katherine, Henry's first wife (or not-wife, depending on your theological position), is his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, one of Mantel's most original creations. In most tellings of the Henry story - the Robert Bolt play "A Man for All Seasons," for example, and the Showtime series "The Tudors" - Cromwell is a demonic figure, the opposite of the sainted Thomas More, whose execution he oversees. In Mantel's version, More is no saint, as he almost certainly was not in real life: he's fussily pious, stiff-necked and unnaturally fond of torturing heretics. Her Cromwell, through whose eyes and inside whose head the story unfolds, is no saint either, but surprisingly he emerges as warm, bright, humane, decent (for the most part) and immensely capable. His command of detail, his habit of reckoning the cost of everything, is reminiscent of England's next great bureaucrat, Samuel Pepys, the diarist and naval administrator, whose keenness for home improvements Mantel may also have borrowed for Cromwell. Cromwell is no religious fanatic - he embraces Protestantism not for doctrinal reasons but because it's economically more advantageous to the crown and also more democratic - and no sentimentalist. His greatest talent is as a reader of men and especially of what he calls The Book Called Henry: the king's many moods and sudden changes of mind. "Bring Up the Bodies" is in many ways a study of power and influence, how to acquire it and how to use it, and makes you realize that serving at court under a willful monarch is not so very different from negotiating your way through the corporate maze, except that now your master can only sack you, not send you to the Tower. The new book is shorter and tauter than its predecessor, and superior in at least one stylistic respect. "Wolf Hall" was told so tightly from Cromwell's point of view that in a single sentence the pronoun "he" could refer to more than one person. Where necessary, "Bring Up the Bodies" helpfully deploys the phrase "he, Cromwell," dispelling a lot of syntactic confusion. But inevitably the second book is less surprising: we know where all this is going now. (In interviews Mantel has promised a third volume, which presumably will end with Cromwell's death in 1540, when, after rewarding him with an earldom, Henry almost in the same moment strikes him down.) And in this volume Cromwell sinks a little in the reader's estimation. He's as genial and warmhearted as ever, but his ruthless, McCarthy-like prosecution of Anne, playing one witness off against another, happens so fast it's harrowing. Mantel never answers the nagging historical question of whether Anne really was unfaithful to the king (with her own brother, among many others, if the rumors were true), but instead leaves us with Cromwell's grimly pragmatic formulation: the king needs men who are guilty, so he has found some who must be guilty of something, even if not what they were charged with. The execution scene is heartbreaking, whatever you think of Anne, and this is how her life ends: "There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore." Here, as elsewhere, Mantel's real triumph is her narrative language. It's not the musty Olde English of so much historical fiction, but neither is it quite contemporary. The Latinate "exsanguinates" is a perfect 16th-century touch, and so is that final, Anglo-Saxon "gore." In some of her books, Mantel is pretty scabrous in her descriptions of present-day England, its tawdriness and cheesiness and weakness for cliché and prettifying euphemism. "Bring Up the Bodies" (the title refers to the four men executed for supposedly sleeping with Anne) isn't nostalgic, exactly, but it's astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history, the antique formulations and brocaded sentimentality of costume-drama novels, so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid, strange and brand new. The king needs men who are guilty, so Thomas Cromwell has found some who must be guilty of something. Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.
Library Journal Review
In her sequel to the Booker Man Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Mantel has done what only the most gifted novelist can: she has fleshed out an enigma-the historical cipher that was Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's fixer-and made us accept her interpretation of him as valid. Cromwell helped Henry annul his marriage to his wife of 20 years, Catherine, so he could marry the younger Anne Boleyn. But three years later, Anne has committed two fatal errors: she hasn't given the king a son, and she has become outspoken. Henry's eyes are on a younger, more placid woman, Jane Seymour. He wants to be rid of Anne, and it is up to Cromwell to see that Henry gets what he wants. VERDICT Mantel's crowning achievement makes Cromwell not just powerful but sympathetic. Mantel is a consummate setter of scenes: stunning, poetic descriptions are embedded in scenes of savagery and earthiness. The historical novel does not come any better than this. It will be as much of a success as its predecessor. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/11.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.