Happy discovery: I’m reading a novel in which every character’s got a Holbein portrait. I know these people, have seen them everywhere—in the Frick, in the National Gallery, of course in reproductions. Thomas Cromwell’s mug, lit by the light of a cloudy-day window, his hand clutching a piece of paper as if it were a weapon. Small-eyed Henry VIII, spread curiously flat on the rectangle, vast and gem-studded. Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, they’re all here. Even Erasmus gets an offhand remote mention, imaginable at the slanted writing desk in Rotterdam where Holbein situated him. The painter himself (to me, a bigger star) has a small role in the novel as itinerant court portraitist, cagey and supercilious. Mantel refers to this artist always as Hans; never anything but Hans. You catch on after a while, it’s that Hans.
Fun to read, too, in the light of our times. At the head of state is a big vain child whose whims are as iron: everybody just works around that. Also, the plague keeps flaring up in London. People have to self-isolate. (Especially the valetudinarian Henry VIII, fearful of going anywhere there’s rumor of a flare-up.) Cromwell loses his wife and daughters to a swift little epidemic in his neighborhood.
Why the persistent pronoun vagueness? Everywhere her pages are populous with the word “he,” but with seldom a clear antecedent. You have to guess who’s talking. And sometimes it’s impossible to guess, there’s no antecedent anywhere in sight. This willingness to confuse, it’s more than an accident, it’s a kind of tic or affectation with her. It’s very consistent, page upon page of it. Her editor will have had to go along with it. Then a copy editor, too, will have queried. May I just take out this “he” and put in “Cromwell”? No, leave it as it is. That’s how the author wants it.
I know a number of people who’ve said of this first book in the trilogy, “I tried it and I admired it, it’s great, but somehow I couldn’t get more than a few pages in.”
An actual king and his councilors arrange, bizarrely, the deaths of beloved women and old friends: the most rewarding part of these books is Mantel’s constructions of what in the world was on these people’s minds. A novelist of the regular, non-generic kind can well envy a writer who takes a jump into a genre like “historicals.” Something in common with tabloid journalism: iconic, historical persons are the actors, so they’re superstars here treading the creaky boards. Also, in historical fiction, the story gets a kind of importance the regular novelist can never achieve. The readers of my inventions are aware, every minute, that they’re watching imaginary people, made-up events. In my novel, I don’t want to trouble the reader with “facticity,” or any pretense of facticity: the complete imaginariness, shared by reader and writer, is a kind of purer experimental space. Hilary Mantel’s readers, by contrast, are stunned into a more urgent form of belief. Readers “know” Mantel is making up these conversations, but nevertheless, because the English king did in fact arrange to have his Anne beheaded, the scene is contaminated with a filthier tingle, more than I could ever manage. (Also, anyway, I’m unfit to write about homicide and easy malevolence and violence. Mantel has always had a penchant for the grisly that’s almost playful—in earlier novels the occasional poke of the grotesque.)
A writer who takes an interest in people other than herself. This is a radical distinction. With some writers, it’s always, always about themselves. (Hemingway? Updike?) Other writers, it’s avowedly never themselves.
In this way Mantel is in the company of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, O’Connor, writers identifying with people who are not them. Thankfully, nobody’s going to tell her she isn’t allowed to. We’re living in a time when an author’s powers of empathy are under suspicion, not to say under indictment. So in Mantel it’s amiable, it’s old-fashioned common bravery, that she wants to be incarnated for a thousand-some pages as this brute thug sycophant Cromwell. How is it that Mantel can get away with appropriating the experience of this strongman prospering in a complete and toxic patriarchy? Because she must love him. Even him. How interesting. If her love is true, it can’t err, it’s what gives the author permission, and carte blanche.
Cromwell: he was the one who could be trusted to help get rid of the wives. He was the one who imprisoned and tortured and killed anybody in the king’s way. He was the one to seize all the church properties so that their wealth and real estate could be divvied up among the aristocracy, a too-big-to-prosecute governmental crime.
The key to a Cromwell type, according to Mantel’s psychology: the “henchman” is master of a kind of pure self-effacement. It’s his ticket to his own aggrandizement. For Thomas Cromwell, nothing is ever about his own interests. No initiatives but the king’s. No welfare but the king’s. No intentions but the king’s. Therefore, no ethical agency of his own.
Cromwell is merely the perfect lawyer, a consiglieri. Such a consiglieri serves his boss’s interests at any price, his own self subsumed into a higher power. This kind of psychology—the gangster’s thug, the touring band’s roadie, the bully who stands guard at the upholstered door and so attains a local omnipotence—gives the henchman special privilege in the world. Un-self-seeking, he feels absolved of all ethical answerability, licensed with fantastic powers.
The personal-pronoun vagueness goes on. It may work as a kind of narrative strategy—along with other small obfuscations, like switching back and forth a bit too transiently between quoted dialogue and indirect dialogue, then adding internal monologue into that mix, so you often have to doublecheck, “Was that remark supposed to be spoken aloud, or merely thought”; or calling the blueblood characters sometimes by their given names, sometimes by their titles, then sometimes by their demesnes, so the “who’s-talking” question becomes all the more tangled. All these things are the sorts of minor snags that an old friend of mine, mechanic of good prose, calls stoppers: not unintelligible, not total meaning-killers, just occasions of hesitation.
By disorienting/confusing the reader, she achieves a feeling of realism. The world of sixteenth-century England—smoke of blacksmith’s forge, stench of eel bucket, uncertainty over who has just spoken, elbows in the crowded streets—feels as hectic and uninterpretable as present real experience.
If this is what she’s doing, reader-bewilderment works to good effect. She’s making the sixteenth century come alive. Mantel doesn’t get her much-praised verisimilitude merely (as other critics have suggested) by endowing her protagonist with a distinctly modern cynicism and irony. I think they had cynicism and irony back then. I infer from general reading that people have had C&I for a few thousand years. (Cromwell had read the newly published Machiavelli, and he admired it; it often crosses his mind.)
The book’s verisimilitude has a certain other supremely important ingredient: the language. It’s beautiful. You’re in the sixteenth century with every sentence. Archaisms and quaintnesses, acquired by hard hours of research, are passed over lightly, thrown away as if valueless.
Machiavelli. He’s referred to as Niccolo. (“Niccolo’s little book” is the only way The Prince is mentioned.) So, again, you have to guess, then realize. Just the way Holbein is always only Hans.
It’s a perfectly understandable authorial dodge, a bit contrived but effective: the celebrities shouldn’t have the same tags they get in stale history textbooks.
About “stoppers.” There are plenty in these three books. But they’re often rooted in something—and furthermore, isn’t pausing over a page sometimes the supreme summit of reading? And the reward of it? It’s not when the eye is careening along, but when the gaze has stopped and dilated: at least for me, those are the times when my own life might be getting a bit larger and better.
Nice to see Thomas Cranmer here. The doomed Archbishop. And nice to see him portrayed as such an equable smart man, in the midst of all the terrible upheaval. He’s one of the great prose writers—it was Cranmer who wrote the searching and very tough marriage vows (“forsaking all others,” “sickness and health,” etc.). So it’s nice to see, too, how he cherishes his Grete, whom he married in secret, risking a clerical apostate’s death.
Of course, we’re seeing Cranmer pre-imprisonment and pre-execution. All these characters are portrayed pre-execution. Every last one of them. It’s a source of plot energy in Mantel’s trilogy: we know full well these people in silks and velvets will end up on the cold stones.
Amazing amount of government brutality in Tudor England. I had no idea. Licensed brutality. Conventional brutality. Even the loftiest aristocrat is at risk of torture on the rack. Or burning or beheading or disembowelment—the same people who were guests at your wedding. I’d never thought of merry England quite this way. At the very top of this civilization, there wasn’t really a “government,” there was just an old melee among competing families, one of whom might at any time hold the throne. (Parliament acting as a kind of flywheel on this engine.)
The King of England’s main job, as sovereign, seems to have been going on hunting sprees. This meant he would put together a gang of friends (“noblemen”) and they would spend the summer and autumn on horseback, “processing” around England, moving into other nobles’ houses, imposing themselves as guests, to spend a few days wiping out the local wildlife. Then move on, with their huge train of servants and sutlers.
The point of all the royal plundering in the countryside seems to have been: I’m doing this because I can. Also: I have the job of regularly demonstrating that I can. (A present-day analogy might be the presidential golfing.) Henry mostly just planned pleasures for himself. Pleasure was his job, legitimately. Vanity, too, was his job. That was another thing everybody had to help with.
In the case of a historical novel, the basic storyline arrives on the author’s desk somewhat prefab, preassembled. I’m guessing Mantel, at a certain point in the long pleasures of research, started sketching out a chronological list:
Born, Putney
Beatings by father
Escape across channel, age sixteen; mercenary soldier, Italy
Alliance with Cardinal Wolsey
Black plague and “sweating sickness”
Death of children and wife
And so forth, on through his work for the king, his rise in society, his disposing of royal wives, a peasant uprising to be repressed, another London epidemic, etc. Concluding with protagonist’s death by beheading.
Since the main events are already set, an author’s task would be deciding how to thread a way through them; and, most importantly, dreaming up the characters’ souls. This latter is the most enlightening pleasure of Mantel’s trilogy: getting a look at Cromwell’s soul. The others’ too—Anne Boleyn’s nasty reptilian little spirit (in Mantel’s version), and Henry VIII’s, and Thomas More’s—but especially the enigmatic Cromwell. The brisk cold-blooded amorality of the man who helped get the well-written English Bible into English hands. Who never did remarry. Who at the height of his lordly eminence still passes time with the cook in the kitchen and, because he’d learned as a street waif, lends a hand by skinning tonight’s dinner, eels. Who always knew who, above him, to kiss up to, and who, below him, to kick in the face. Who kept little terriers all his life, beginning at age nine, and named each one in succession Belle. He’s always at the center, and he never stops being interesting.
Mantel’s narration sometimes feels hodgepodge, inattentive to the comfort of the readers’ ride.
For example, a close depiction of the protagonist’s inmost thoughts can be interrupted by long dumps of background information. The flow of narration can feel like lists, whether of a day’s activities or of recently elapsed historical events. Even the ordering of scenes: the author is working her way along the stations her research laid out for her. The whole novel, then—and especially the third in the series—has an indiscriminate inclusiveness that’s almost “artless.” Somewhat Melvillian in artlessness: the way Melville can digress on whaling with little regard for point-of-view or narrative relevance, but rather because it was all fascinating to him.
The greatest art can be “artless.” Always remember that.
At a couple of points, Mantel’s own Christianity seems to show through, without the padded insulation of ironic remove. (Which, I hasten to say, is perfectly all right.) One or two inner soliloquies of Cromwell seem to bump down on a bedrock theology. At such points, Cromwell’s inmost motive is actually altruistic: the restoration of an intelligible gospel to the common people.
Nice use of research:
In the second book, there’s this detail about courtly protocol. The king is out riding with his posse, and a fine point of etiquette comes up:
…early in the day he lost his hat so all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes—
(All his subordinates got a bad sunburn that day.)
Then, almost a thousand pages later, near the end of the three volumes, Cromwell and his fellow courtiers are walking together into Westminster. This is just before the moment when all these old friends and hangers-on are about to turn and pounce in ambush, to take him to prison and death. His hat blows off, rolls toward the Thames—and he notices nobody else takes off his own hat.
It’s time to get rid of the fourth wife, and here is Mantel’s typical portrait of a man’s intractable moral defects. The topic is first broached by a despondent king:
“…because—” He leans his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. “Cromwell, can we not pay her off?”
Dialogue throughout is very fine, a pleasure, calculated. Dialogue often pricks into a character’s third dimension—and it’s a completely unsuspected third dimension, even an immense, burgeoning, ripe dimension. Mantel, as writer, positions herself at the artifice end of the “artifice-vs-mimesis” spectrum. There’s a lot of wit, for these terrible, corrupt people are, in addition, wise and funny. Especially, dependably, the wonderful acerbic women, lacking any power in this world but endowed with sharp tongues and sharp insights.
This whole trilogy is made up of short vignette sections of five hundred to two thousand words, and each one is built to end on some poignancy, some understated revelation, some subtle joke. One mustn’t rush this book, or speed-read; one must linger for the aftertaste. It’s always there.
What is the special grant of plausibility that pertains in historical novels? Are we supposed to believe Thomas Cromwell had a hot flirtation with a blueblood lady in a courtyard’s shadows? Was Thomas More really so hard-hearted a torturer of heretics?
For historical novels, there seems to exist a special epistemological space. A regular non-historical takes place in a zone of pure fanciful invention; or else subjective personal experience. Any question of objective facticity would tend to pollute. Whereas, in historicals, the “facts” can be precisely the main attraction. We read because we want to learn about Renaissance Italy, or Artemisia Gentileschi, or the French Revolution. In my own instance, I’m glad now to know more about Tudor England than I did.
Yet still, in historical fiction, the inclusion of “facts” can stimulate an immune response in the tissue of the novel itself. Was Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary really such an indiscriminate floozy? Maybe the historical record does suggest it, in some way. But then, did she try to seduce Thomas Cromwell in a garden’s dark corner? Well, there’s the tickle of the immune response.
Of course, none of these questions matter to readers. Most readers want to be enchanted; they don’t bother over the metaphysics or ethics of storytelling, not consciously. But I wonder if they do subconsciously feel compromised. When told of an illegitimate daughter of Cromwell’s who never did exist, or a wanton boyhood murder he in fact never committed, the reader is asked just to stop thinking too closely about it. Personally, I’m willing to go along—I’m not proposing any hard evaluative rule. But it’s an interesting problem for a writer: the compromised epistemological world of the historical-fiction reader. The truth/falsehood distinction goes deep in our whole culture. It’s hard to keep putting on and taking off your special astigmatism glasses. Maybe historicals’ mixing fiction with nonfiction is what demotes them, in aesthetes’ esteem, to a “genre.”
By about halfway through the whole trilogy, I’m getting to like—a lot!—what I’d objected to: the pronoun bamboozlement.
With an impressive consistency, the author balks at any use of the proper noun Cromwell as the subject of a sentence. After a while, you catch on that every unattributed “he” is Cromwell. Once you can adopt this assumption, it defines an enveloping cloud of point-of-view in the trilogy. The truth is, you never do get completely used to it (vague pronoun reference is always vague pronoun reference), yet still, at every instance, the unattributed he serves to keep jerking your bridle back into his subjective world.
In order to keep her practice perfectly consistent, after a certain point she has to take up the odd device of saying “he, Cromwell.” As in: “At last he, Cromwell, spoke up.” That kind of construction pops up regularly, three or four times per page.
(This isn’t exactly a new thing with her. It occurs in her previous novel Beyond Black, the device of placing the proper noun in apposition after the pronoun. Very peculiar. But an innovation.)
Halfway through the trilogy, I’ve actually grown fond of “he, Cromwell” as agent in a sentence. Lucky for Mantel, Cromwell is a sonorous name, and in page upon page, that iron name’s regular tolling adds a ponderousness. The designation he, Cromwell can imply his personal feeling of insecurity (his precarious sense of self-importance along with his actual importance). He, Cromwell: it keeps putting the man himself, his big belly, in the room. And it does bolster the point-of-view, in a long trilogy where nothing ever transpires outside the intelligence of Thomas Cromwell.
People say the third volume is too long and needed an editor. They’re wrong. Just be patient. A book this good doesn’t last forever. Each one of the seven hundred and fifty pages is worth it.
I get the feeling that, by the third volume in the trilogy, there are fewer “stoppers.” And that she has abandoned some of the stylistic policies she’d set up early in the book. (I think all writers do this, as they go along.) By a certain point, the narration is plainer, more naturalistic, driven by its own necessity.
Maybe this modulation to a quicker, simpler flow is just my own subjective impression. But if it isn’t, would it constitute an improvement? Or would it be, rather, a loss of texture? A loss of a peculiar narrative resource? At this point, I’d been won over by the difficulty of those early pages. I kind of missed it. I had become a special friend of all those peculiarities. Maybe I got acclimated.
An adage I ran across someplace: The first job of a great book is to teach the reader how it should be read.
Louis B. Jones is the author of five novels, as well as occasional short stories and criticism.
