Bring Up the Bodies

People will insist on lending me books. I disappoint most of them, as I rarely find myself able to devote the time needed to properly digest a book, but I find it flattering, nonetheless, that people consider me someone to lend books to. The most recent loan, however, I have been reading with some vigor: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies. It is a sequel to Wolf Hall, which I liked very much, and apparently it is the second in a projected Cromwell trilogy.

For anyone with a passing knowledge of Tudor history, the book should have little suspense: we know, after all, how all of the characters end up. (In both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies there are, at the beginning of the book, lists of characters with descriptions, a sort of dramatis personae that eliminates the need for tiresome exposition.) For every character we know it is just a matter of counting down the years, the months, the days, until their demise (usually violent, in that time, it seems). And yet Mantel is a fine enough author to make it all gripping. We know Anne Boleyn's fate, of course, and Catherine of Aragon's, and Thomas Cromwell's, but it is still fascinating to read about them as Mantel has written. She has managed to make us root for a man of questionable integrity. As she writes it, Cromwell is a modern man who happens to have lived in the late Renaissance. But it's not so hacky as that might sound; he is a man of unsure religious conviction, a moneylender (which is to say, capitalist), lawyer, extortionist, possibly a murderer. But he is sympathetic, as she writes him.

It is also helpful that Mantel is capable of simply stunning prose:

When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve's plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring? Schoolmen will have addressed the question. A dozen furrowed generations. Tonsured heads bent. Chilblained fingers fumbling scrolls. It's the sort of silly question monks are made for. I'll ask Cranmer, he thinks: my archbishop.
...
He sleeps again and dreams of the flowers made before the dawn of the world. They are made of white silk. There is no bush or stem to pluck them from. They lie on the bare uncreated ground.