hilary mantel the mirror and the light review

Pali texts attributed to the Buddha (tr.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). Plus requisite egghead tomes: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Torah, Gospels, Dante (I hover between the more literal Durling and Kirkpatrick's looser translation) Not to forget Michel Faber's ambitious fables, or Michel Houellebecq's infuriatingly thoughtful, misanthropic pisstakes-as-prose. Henry Glassie's 'Passing the Time in Ballymenone' exemplifies passion wedded to scholarship. On a short shelf of ten prose masters, apart from my top 20 (compiled separately farther down):Įrnie O'Malley's 'On Another Man's Wound' Īlexander Theroux's 'Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual.'

Hilary Mantel's 'The Mirror and the Light': Book R.

Murphyīest Books of 2020 list at Spectrum Culture 12/13/20 Hindsight may well show theĪward went to a less qualified contender than this harrowing, intricate Sensations of early 16th-century England. Love and labor spent convincingly conjuring up the scenes, smells and Hilary Mantel deserved her third Booker Prize in 2020-she wonīack-to-back for her first two titles-for her culmination of a decade’s You into deadly tumult, where intelligence battles against emotion, and Self-consuming, as Cromwell reckons with his fate. This voice churns on, sardonic, sharp and ultimately Machinations of a religious revolt and a political subversion he has Her protagonist’s consciousness, delivers a relentless, compellingĮvocation of a crafty consultant to the Crown who must survive Renderings of an indirect first-person narration as if burrowed inside Suspicion for his radical Lutheran sympathies. Reformist factions of Protestants clash will place Cromwell under The span encompasses the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’sĮxecution up through the pending marriage of King Henry VIII to hisĬromwell engineers the occasional rise of his proteges or theįrequent fall of his rivals.

Mantel provides a vivid, convincing and gripping finale to the saga of Listed in the book’s front to remember who’s who among all the ThomasesĪnd Lords of this and Earls of that shire. Even so, I had to keep flipping to the cast of characters

It helped for me to have seen, in the interim between Bring Up the Bodies and this final installment of the trilogy, both the televised Wolf Hall adaptation of the first and second books and The Tudors

Hilary mantel the mirror and the light review