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.