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Dominique is Currently Reading

Dominique is currently reading

The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)

by Hilary Mantel

bookshelves: audiobook, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, physical-copy, favourite-ever, ebook, currently-reading, adult, re-reads

Reading for the 3rd time

read in April 2020

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Dominique said: " One of the last chapters of The Mirror and the Light is called ‘Magnificence’, and at the end of it, Thomas Cromwell is finally arrested and taken to the Tower. But in it, he is also made Earl of Essex: he both ascends the zenith of his career, and p One of the last chapters of The Mirror and the Light is called ‘Magnificence’, and at the end of it, Thomas Cromwell is finally arrested and taken to the Tower. But in it, he is also made Earl of Essex: he both ascends the zenith of his career, and plummets to its very depths, mere moments later. I stared at that chapter title and thought about how perfectly that sums up this entire book. Magnificence. Just over half way through it began to occur to me that, really, this book is a tragedy. In the classical sense — the Shakespearean sense. It’s a book of extremes, of high drama, where your tragic hero climbs to great heights, and then falls. And it sounds so trite — but there is real sorrow in watching a character you have loved, admired, learnt from, be irretrievably lost. ‘Magnificence’ feels like the title of some 16th century painting, and in many ways this novel really is exactly like some grand classical masterpiece by Titian or something — when you look closely, all you can see is vague lines, dabs of colour; it’s not until you step away that the entire picture falls into place. That you look around you and think, woah! How did she do that?! Quite scarily, Hilary Mantel points to this very thing herself, in The Mirror and the Light: ‘It is like putting together one of the pavements at the abbey. You have triangles…circles, rectangles, squares…limestone, porphyry, serpentine and glass. You must work with the eye of faith: the onlookers will not see the pattern, till suddenly they do.’

Hilary Mantel plays with the fact that you know this is coming. We all know the history. She knows that you’re constantly waiting for the gavel to come down and for cries of ‘treason!’ and so…she doesn’t give it to you. The entire first half of this novel feels curiously weightless. You look at the size of it — I could barely hold it in my hand — and you normally you’d groan but there’s a real gliding quality to the prose in the first half that is really lovely to read. But then, hints begin in to fall. In subtle, teasing ways, all throughout the book. You think he’s done for — then he’s back in Henry’s good graces again. You think, surely that’s it, now, you can’t say something like that to a King and get away with it? But he does. You think…Thomas you’re getting too big for your boots, now…but apparently he wasn’t. Not at that moment, not at the next…He’s never checked. I kept thinking to myself, if only his wife were still alive, she would have brought him down a peg or two, and kept the damn idiot alive. And he carries on, gliding away, his sails growing ever-bigger, and then, when the real thing comes, you’re least expecting it: just made Earl of Essex. Hilary Mantel, in an interview I watched, called his fall ‘precipitous’, and it is. It’s like being pushed off a cliff. There’s no ‘decline’ here: it really is Icarus (who, ironically, gets a shout-out in one of the last chapters) flying too close, too high and then — drop. Which I’m glad about. Most of this book is a commendation to Thomas Cromwell, a celebration of him, rather than a swan-song.

But it’s also a study in how ambition changes you. Very very gradually, Thomas Cromwell begins to transmute into a different character in this book. To the point where he becomes ‘He, Essex’ rather than ‘He, Cromwell’. There were moments so shocking I burst out laughing, incredulous that Thomas Cromwell, this character who I thought I knew like the back of my hand was doing or saying something astonishing (and there were several, but I won’t say because spoilers). Openly thinking, ‘Make me regent’, saying ‘If I were King’; ‘Jane should have married me, I would have managed it better’. You cringe — but this is tempered by Henry’s own decline. There’s less laudatory prose about him after Anne’s death, and where Henry begins to sink, Thomas Cromwell only expands — and you start to see it from his point of view. It’s not ‘ambition’ if it would be right. How is it ‘hubris’ when there’s no doubt Thomas would have genuinely made a far better King than Henry would have? There isn’t a question about who is more qualified. Very slowly, the idea that the only thing that separates ‘hubris’ from ‘good statesmanship’ is circumstance of birth — unravels in the narrative. You become impressed by how unfair it all is, how the field is always tilted. There is an afterword, after the final page where Thomas dies where Hilary Mantel spells out, very perfunctorily, what happened to everyone else in her books. And it was horrible to read about how arbitrary fate was: how bad people prospered, how they get to tell how history paints him. It was very sad. You could take a very depressing message away from it, I think — that it was all for nothing. But the fact that Hilary Mantel renders Thomas’ final moments — which were beautifully, heart-wrenchingly written — as a return to that very first scene from Wolf Hall where Thomas is being beaten, ‘So now get up’, makes it oddly triumphant. Thomas’ last lines are doing that — getting up, moving. There’s a line that always haunts me, from Wolf Hall: ‘Forward, forward, en avant!’ which I feel nicely encapsulates an ethos about his character that is always energetic, alive, hopeful, even in death.

Reading the final chapters, though, became an intensely physical experience. The sheer anxiety was overwhelming. I had to shut the book just to get my breath back; my hands were shaking, my mouth was dry, my fingers were going cold…and you always know you’re reading a bloody good book when that happens. And this doesn’t happen unless you care about the characters. Hilary Mantel’s stand-out achievement of this series is not her writing, her subtlety, her historical accuracy, but her characters; more specifically, Thomas Cromwell. He is it. Hilary Mantel finds a place inside you and makes him speak to it, and it transcends all the usual demographics of a reader. I can honestly say I have learnt things from this character — a mindset, an approach; what confidence really means; how you can inhabit it, or pretend it; how to consider those around you in a world that feels utterly indifferent to your pains; how to consider a problem as an advantage, rather than an obstacle; how to think in strategy; how to be brave; how to be enterprising; how to overcome doubt. There’s a feeling that, no matter what your station in life, your gender, your race, your circumstances, Thomas Cromwell has something to teach you. This is a man who is a polymath, of formidable skill and intelligence, who can do pretty much anything and everything you put him to. And what I love is the fact that, looking at the childhood Hilary Mantel carves out for him, Thomas Cromwell shouldn’t be able, really, to do any of these things at all; he should have become exactly like his father. But like everything else, this series is a lesson in how to see the advantages in places where it looks as if there are none. And as someone who struggles a lot with mental illness, this series has been a guiding light in some tough times. Books like this are the best kind, and this is a book series I am sure I will cherish for the rest of my life.

And now for the final question: should it win the booker? It should. I don’t know if it will, purely because of how unprecedented and politically awkward it might be, to give a white woman who’s already won twice another prize, but for me, it blows competition out the water. I don’t know you could argue that this novel, and now that you can step back and see, that this entire series, isn’t a masterpiece. ...more "

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(page 777 of 883)
"I keep thinking, if his wife were still around, she’d be putting Cromwell in his place." — Apr 11, 2020 06:30AM

Feb 13, 2023 02:20PM · see review

Dominique is currently reading

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

bookshelves: dissertation, re-reads, favourite-ever, literary-fiction, audiobook, physical-copy, currently-reading, classics, ebook, for-study

Reading for the 3rd time

read in September 2020

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Dominique said: " one day i'll write a proper PROPER review for this. but seeing as it's my favourite classic, i don't think i'll ever do it justice. to be honest, my dissertation probably won't either. but! this time i read it alongside a new fully scholar annotated ...more "

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(55%)
"Heathcliff in his villain era is THE best part of this book. I don’t feel people quite understand how UNMATCHED these levels are of unhinged, sadistic, tyrannical behaviour. Stick him in a room with any other 19th century villain and he is winning all day long. Just pure Machiavellian delight *chef’s kiss*" — Feb 06, 2026 01:12PM

Sep 18, 2020 12:26PM · see review

Dominique is currently reading

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, adult, audiobook, non-fiction, physical-copy

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Dec 28, 2024 12:33PM

Dominique’s Quotes

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

tags: elizabeth-bennet, jane-austen

7950 likes

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

tags: echo, words

1151 likes