breathedout (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
breathedout) wrote2018-12-17 10:00 pm
breathedout) wrote2018-12-17 10:00 pm
On Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies
Mission Actually Finish Some Books 6/9:
Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
Fan-fucking-tastic. Not for those amongst my Tumblr brethren who dislike antiheroes, however you define them; but Mantel’s bullying, grief-stricken and exquisitely opportunistic Cromwell can practically be tasted upon the page. For the first half of this novel I was concerned he’d been de-fanged a bit between Wolf Hall and its sequel, but the second half brings back all his glorious moral complexity, lets him connive and intrigue, and ends with the hovering shadow of Stephen Gardiner menacing him from abroad.
It’s one of the most over-trodden stories in English history, the procurement and casting off of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII, but Mantel still had me in thrall to both her plot and her language. Wolf Hall is the book that convinced me historical fiction could be done compellingly, so I’m not sure why I’m at all surprised to be in ecstasies upon finishing its sequel, BUT HERE I AM.
Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
Fan-fucking-tastic. Not for those amongst my Tumblr brethren who dislike antiheroes, however you define them; but Mantel’s bullying, grief-stricken and exquisitely opportunistic Cromwell can practically be tasted upon the page. For the first half of this novel I was concerned he’d been de-fanged a bit between Wolf Hall and its sequel, but the second half brings back all his glorious moral complexity, lets him connive and intrigue, and ends with the hovering shadow of Stephen Gardiner menacing him from abroad.
It’s one of the most over-trodden stories in English history, the procurement and casting off of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII, but Mantel still had me in thrall to both her plot and her language. Wolf Hall is the book that convinced me historical fiction could be done compellingly, so I’m not sure why I’m at all surprised to be in ecstasies upon finishing its sequel, BUT HERE I AM.
When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, 'Did they do it?’ But when [Cromwell] says 'Are they guilty?’ he means 'Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it onto white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen. He has seen beautiful indictments, not a word wasted. This was not one: the phrases jostled and frotted, nudged and spilled, ugly in content and ugly in form. The design against Anne is unhallowed in its gestation, untimely in its delivery, a mass of tissue born shapeless; it waited to be licked into shape as a bear cub is licked by its mother. You nourished it, but you did not know what you fed: who would have thought of Mark confessing, or of Anne acting in every respect like an oppressed and guilty woman with a weight of sin upon her? It is as the men said today in court: we are guilty of all sorts of charges, we have all sinned, we all are riddled and rotten with offences and, even by the light of church and gospel, we may not know what they are.