Gary Knapton’s Reviews > Bring Up the Bodies > Status Update

'The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if only you can see it.' The depiction of Cromwell in this slow beat Machiavellian examination of the fall of Anne Boleyn is quite something. Mantel has written a trilogy from inside his head. Foreboding and darkly affected. Politics ever.

'The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if only you can see it.' The depiction of Cromwell in this slow beat Machiavellian examination of the fall of Anne Boleyn is quite something. Mantel has written a trilogy from inside his head. Foreboding and darkly affected. Politics ever.

Tracking the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour in Henry's affections. Like Wolf Hall, Mantel writes in a dialogue/ diary notation/ soliloquy style presenting a court from inside the head of Cromwell. Dark and steady and equally magnetic. History made modern. A literary 3D effect.