The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
The Mirror and the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell…It's a story that could be the stuff of venerable and fusty historical fiction, but Mantel clears away the cobwebs. Missing are the archaic dialogue and laborious scene-setting, the dense clutter of details signaling diligent research…Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, like Penelope Fitzgerald. The more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power. They share an interest in what power reveals and conceals in human character…This is not a younger man's book, not a book of striving. It is a novel of late middle age, a novel of preserving what one has seized—of fighting off young, hungry men who remind you of yourself, who will use your own methods against you. Above all, it is a novel of living with the dead.
Publishers Weekly
03/16/2020
In Mantel's magisterial conclusion to the Wolf Hall trilogy, Henry VIII's fixer, Thomas Cromwell, is everywhere. Born poor, Cromwell has risen to Viceregent, Privy Seal, and Baron, with more than a fair share of blood on his hands. The story picks up where Bring Up the Bodies left off, with Cromwell, now in his 50s, witnessing the execution of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell reconciles the king to his stubbornly Catholic daughter, supervises the printing of the English Bible, and arranges the king's marriage to Anne of Cleves. Meanwhile, Cromwell reflects on his crimes and remembers his impoverished youth ("we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain"). In Henry's court, everyone has a grudge; key issues, whether religious, personal, or political, are decided according to who has the king's ear; and disagreement is easily framed as treason. Mantel's craft shines at the sentence level and in a deep exploration of her themes: Henry sees himself as "the mirror and light" to all other princes, but Cromwell is Henry's secret mirror, the record of the king's weaknesses and compromises. Cromwell keeps turning wreckage into building materials, until, that is, the wreckage is his. The series' first two books won the Booker Prize—the third, rich with memory and metaphor—may be even better. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade." —The New York Times Book Review
"The Mirror & the Light is the triumphant capstone to Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who rose to become the consigliere of Henry VIII...The world is blotted out as you are enveloped in the sweep of a story rich with conquest, conspiracy and mazy human psychology…. Mantel is often grouped with writers of historical fiction, [but] the more apt, and useful, comparison might be with Robert Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, the great anatomizer of political power." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"The searing finale of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent trilogy...Mantel is clear-eyed yet compassionate in depicting her coldly calculating, covertly idealistic protagonist and the equally complex people he encounters in his rise and fall from power. Dense with resonant metaphors and alive with discomfiting ideas, The Mirror & the Light provides a fittingly Shakespearean resolution to Mantel’s magisterial work." —The Washington Post
"Wolf Hall, a decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story." —NPR
"Cromwell [has] a depth at once Shakespearean and modernist. He could be Hamlet, or the title character of one of Freud’s case studies...The dissolution of Cromwell coincides with his unmooring in time... One moment he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled into the sphere of the angels." — Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Breathtaking...The plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller…. With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of...Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century. Someone give the Booker Prize judges the rest of the year off." —Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian
"Is it as good as the first two books? Yes. Is it a masterpiece? Yes...Mantel may be unique among modern novelists in her ability to make the past as viscerally compelling as the present. A sensualist, she re-creates an age rife with beauty and dread...She re-creates the wicked, bawdy humor of the age, and her action scenes rival Shakespeare. She is an intricate and flawless plotter...But her overriding genius is for characterization." —The Los Angeles Times
"A masterpiece...A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors...The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent." —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
"Brilliant... From that opening sentence—‘Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away’—axes and the shadow of death are everywhere...Mantel takes what is known of Cromwell—his meteoric rise, his autodidactic scholarship, his reformist tendencies—and weaves them into a masterful portrait of a man at mid-life, facing up to his past." —The Boston Globe
"The entire trilogy is a brilliant engagement with the exercise and metaphysics of power in 16th-century Europe, an age in which sovereignty was understood to be divinely conferred, channeled through blood...Ms. Mantel has wonderfully conjured the mentality, materiality and channels of power in a vanished age…It is Ms. Mantel’s depiction of Cromwell’s inner workings, so credibly and vividly imagined, that make the work great, as do the characters she summons." —The Wall Street Journal
"A stunning capstone to an epic that’s both engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement...The Mirror & the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the complex pieces of Cromwell’s character while leading inexorably toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and innovators." —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic...What The Mirror & the Light offers—even more than the two previous volumes—is engulfing, total sensory immersion in a world...As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may." —Simon Schama, The Financial Times
"A masterpiece...A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors...The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent.” —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
“Deep, suspenseful, chewy, complex and utterly transporting—truly a full banquet. Most miraculously of all, it’s every bit as good as the first two books, both of which won the Booker Prize. Imagine if the third The Godfather movie had been just as magnificent as the first two: It’s like that. A perfectly executed masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, The Wall Street Journal Magazine
"These novels are sure to be among the books that endure from the early decades of this century…In a novel that could travel far on character and plot, Mantel adds the accelerant of gorgeous language…We are in strange territory, an era that can feel very foreign…But what is not strange—what is achingly familiar and acutely relevant—is the way Mantel meticulously unfolds to us the nature of the human heart, all the old unchanging lusts, avarices, jealousies, hatreds and loves, the desire to live, the fear of death." —Geraldine Brooks, Air Mail
"This is rich, full-bodied fiction. Indeed, it might well be the best of the trilogy simply because there is more of it, a treasure on every page...The brisk, present-tense narration makes you feel as though you are watching these long-settled events live, via a shaky camera phone... Mantel has…elevated historical fiction as an art form... At a time when the general movement of literature has been towards the margins, she has taken us to the dark heart of history." —The Times (London)
"Fascinating...What Mantel does, often brilliantly, is put movement and muscle on the bare bones of what’s known...[Cromwell’s] bundled contradictions—a polyglot scholar with bruised knuckles, as ruthless in business as he was benevolent at home—are more than mirror and light; they’re real, indelible life." —Entertainment Weekly
"The Mirror & the Light [features] the embroiled, ruthless, visionary hero of Mantel’s masterwork trilogy, the endlessly compelling Thomas Cromwell...Every page is rich with insight, the soul-deep characterization and cutting observational skill that make Mantel’s trilogy such a singular accomplishment." —USA Today
"Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians...As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry." —The Telegraph (UK)
"Cromwell is a character for the ages...The stunning success of the novels is in large part the result of Ms. Mantel’s skill in fashioning a voice and persona that, while never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem eerily contemporary...Mantel’s genius is to make his 16th-century instincts, such as a willingness to decapitate anyone standing in his path, seem as plausible as his more familiar qualities." —The Economist
“The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel’s genius; it’s a richly hued mural of meticulous research, enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who hoard power and those who crave it.” —O Magazine
"Mantel’s prose is rich and vivid…Mantel makes the past feel so immediate that it seems possible Cromwell might actually manage to save himself…Expectations are high for this novel. And it lives up to them." —Vox
“Beautifully written…The book makes for compulsive reading; if it doesn’t win its author her third Booker Prize, there’s no justice.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Brilliant…. Mantel enthralls with her descriptions of royal life, from its bizarre rites and traditions to its practicalities…. Her research is prodigious, her skill at complex plotting breathtaking, but her greatest strength is her characters and the dialogue she imagines for them.” —Tampa Bay Times
“This huge canvas, expertly painted as always, offers many of the pleasures you’ve come to expect of Mantel and her Cromwell books...Cromwell’s execution [is] a brilliantly imagined moment.” —The New Yorker
"Another masterpiece of historical fiction...The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop...A complex, insightful exploration of power, sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft...A stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times." —Independent (UK)
"Mantel’s prose is steadily and quietly luminous, occasionally delivering unforgettable surprises...This is a worthy conclusion to what is undoubtedly one of the great historical fictions of the age, sustaining clarity, tension and depth with a rare consistency." —New Statesman (UK)
"Mantel’s trilogy—historically scrupulous, but quaveringly alert to more recent resonances— is one of the key achievements in English literature.” —The Spectator (UK)
"In Mantel’s hands, the story of the Tudors loses all its heavy familiarity and starts to feel like a custom-built vehicle for her muscular prose and savage wit, not to mention her lifelong concern with violence and evil, religion and ghosts...The page-by-page texture of the writing in The Mirror & the Light is just as rich and interesting as ever, the pacing and the distribution of scenes are just as lively, and the details every bit as funny...Mantel’s prodigious feat is to have given Cromwell another face, one that he might even have recognized as his own; she has cast a dazzling new light onto the tarnished mirror of the past." —TLS (UK)
"Magisterial...Mantel's craft shines at the sentence level and in a deep exploration of her themes...The series' first two books won the Booker Prize—the third, rich with memory and metaphor—may be even better." —Publishers Weekly
"The longed-for final volume in Mantel’s magnificent trilogy is also a stupendously knowledgeable, empathic, witty, harrowing, and provocative novel of power and its distortions...Astute, strategic, sly, funny, poignant, and doomed, Cromwell rules these vivid pages, yet every character and setting resonates, and Mantel’s virtuoso, jousting dialogue is exhilarating...[A] timeless saga of the burden of rule, social treacheries, and the catastrophic cost of indulging a raving despot." —Booklist (starred review)
The Guardian
"It is magnificent…A masterpiece that will keep yielding its riches, changing as its readers change, going forward with us into the future . . . Mantel is still exuberantly rethinking what novels can do. Not since Bleak House has the present tense performed such magic. The narrative voice rides at times like a spirit or angel on thermals of vitality, catching the turning seasons, the rhythms of work and dreams, cities and kitchens and heartbeats."
The Times (UK)
"Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels make 99 per cent of contemporary literary fiction feel utterly pale and bloodless by comparison. After a few sentences of The Mirror & the Light – a few words, even – you’re thinking, yes, this is how it should be done . . . Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history. 'The past is not a rehearsal, it is the show itself,' as she has said. And what a show"
Daily Mail (UK)
"It's the capstone on an amazing feat of sustained achievement."
Independent (UK)
"Ambitious, compassionate, clear-eyed yet emotional, passionate and pragmatic, The Mirror & the Light lays down a marker for historical fiction that will set the standard for generations to come."
Telegraph (UK)
"Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians. We are lucky to have it. As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry."
Evening Standard (London)
"What Mantel gets so brilliantly right are the intimate details that counted for everything in a Renaissance court – the gossip, the importance of sheer proximity to the monarch, how rumour passes through ladies in waiting, the way the king’s very chamber pot is treated reverently…So, to cut to the chase, does it merit another Booker? Yes it does."
Daily Telegraph (London)
Mantel’s style remains exhilarating: It is a conflation of expansiveness and precision, refined across her career, which has no peer. . . It is a demanding novel, assuming intelligence and deep engagement in its readers . . . The rewards are unrivalled – it is a book not read, but to be lived.
Library Journal
03/13/2020
The finale of Mantel's extraordinary trilogy comes eight years after Bring Up the Bodies, at the end of which Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded, accused on tainted evidence of adultery. This book starts with Henry's chief minister and fixer, Thomas Cromwell, walking away from the execution. He'd done what the king needed but regrets doing it. Henry has long grown out of his youthful promise into a monster of ego, and it's getting harder to please this fickle, guilt-ridden sovereign. Cromwell negotiates his way past two more queens for Henry—Jane Seymour, who dies in childbirth, and Anne of Cleves, rejected by Henry in the marriage bed. All the time, the wolves gather. Eventually, innuendo and cooked-up evidence brings down the hated minister. This is a tale of ghosts as well as live men: Cromwell mentally relives his past as he heads, ineluctably, toward his fall. Readers may be put off by the denseness of the book's prose, but that's its power: the details of living in a far-past time surround and enrich the narrative. VERDICT Mantel has no equal in historical fiction at setting a scene, telling a compelling story, and delineating vibrant characters. Libraries won't be able to keep this book on the shelves. [See "Seasonal Selections," LJ 2/20.]—David Keymer, Cleveland
MARCH 2020 - AudioFile
The many listeners enthralled by the earlier two volumes in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy will find all their expectations met in this final installment. Mantel has brought historical fiction to a new level with her rich sense of period detail and her ability to bring historical characters and voices to life. Actor Ben Miles, who collaborated with Mantel on the stage production of the earlier two volumes, is more intrinsic to the narrative than one senses in most author/narrator matches. The brilliance of this collaboration is heard especially in Miles’s characterization of Henry VIII—aging, petulant and self-pitying, wrought with pain from a festering injury, and exceedingly dangerous. Here is a narrative achievement of the highest order. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-02-25
The end comes for Thomas Cromwell—and for the brilliant trilogy about his life that began with Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012).
“Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away”: With this perfect sentence, Mantel plunges into the scene of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and there’s no need to spell out who “he” is. On the second page, the executioner, who was brought over from France, refers to him as Cremuel (“No Frenchman can ever pronounce his name”), and finally, a few paragraphs later, when the swordsman is showing off the special blade he used on the queen, “he, Cromwell, touches a finger to the metal.” And we’re off, knowing that by the end it will be Cromwell’s head that rolls. (We can only hope his executioner will be as meticulous.) In the meantime, we get more of everything we’d expect from Mantel’s evocation of the reign of Henry VIII: power, rivalry, strategy, love, loyalty, ambition, regret, loneliness, lust—all centered on the magnetic Cromwell, a man who knows everything from the number of soldiers commanded by each nobleman in England to the secret desires of their wives and daughters. The narrative voice is as supple and insinuating as ever, but the tone is more contemplative—now that the newly made Lord Cromwell has attained the loftiest heights, he returns often to certain touchstones from his past—while the momentum drives forward to our hero’s inevitable fall. (Perhaps it could have driven forward a little more relentlessly; it does occasionally idle.) Cromwell has become almost a bogeyman to the people of England, and Mantel describes his reputation with characteristic dry humor: “He means to…tamper with the baker’s scales, and fix liquid measures in his favour. The man is like a weasel, who eats his own weight every day.” Mantel has created a vivid 16th-century universe, but sometimes it feels like she’s speaking directly to her modern reader, particularly about the role of women: “Try smiling. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel. Not that you can put it like that to a woman…she might take it badly.”
A triumph.
