theinferior4+1

The new Hilary Mantel is out!!!  Bring Up the Bodies is a sequel to Wolf Hall, Mantel’s take on Thomas Cromwell.  The beginning of the new one sags a bit, as we follow Cromwell on his rounds as Master Secretary for Henry VIII -- going on progress with Henry, trying to find more income for the state, soothing both Anne Boleyn and Henry’s first wife Katherine and their various supporters.

After that, though, Mantel does something very interesting.  Cromwell, who has been a very sympathetic character so far, tries to help Henry get out of his second marriage so that he can marry a third wife, Jane Seymour.  And slowly, so gradually you almost don’t realize it, Cromwell becomes less sympathetic, harder, taking on Henry’s tasks whether they’re just or not.  In fact, he seems to know they’re unjust -- at one point he thinks, “Would Norris understand if he spelled it out?  He needs guilty men.  So he has found men who are guilty.  Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”  And even more gradually we discover that he’s doing this partly for revenge, that all the men he charges with adultery with Anne Boleyn once made fun of his first master, Cardinal Wolsey.

 It’s chilling to follow the career of someone you’ve liked, someone who’d been so friendly and easy going, only to discover that all along he had this controlling side, that he succumbed so easily to the lure of power.  “Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect.  Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle.  Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.”  (As you can see, the writing is so great it’s hard not to keep quoting it.)

At first I even wondered if Mantel was doing this deliberately; after all, she had seemed to like Cromwell so much in the first book.  Then I realized that she is so much in control of her material that of course she’s doing it deliberately, that she knew where she was going from the beginning.

And then more of the beginning falls into place: Cromwell loved his first master Wolsey in part because Wolsey became a father-figure to him, because his own father was so terrible; and he works so hard for Henry in part because he’s another father-figure; and some of his hardness, his cruelty, comes from that very father who he thinks he’s left behind, transcended.  He becomes an enormously complex figure, even questioning his own actions: “It is a long moment.  He feels himself on the edge of something unwelcome: superfluous knowledge, useless information.  He turns, hesitates, and reaches out, tentative...”

Is he going to regret the deaths of all the men (and the woman) he arranged?  How is he going to face his own fall from power?  I can’t wait for the next book.

A few months ago I read Harry Potter y La Piedra Filosofal, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in Spanish.  I mention this because while I was reading it I was enjoying it a lot, more than when I read it in English, but it took me until now to figure out why.  The English version was full of clichés and bad writing, but since I don’t know what the clichés are in Spanish, and since I’m not fluent enough to recognize bad writing, it didn’t bother me as much.  Also, Spanish doesn’t seem to have the word “smirk,” which seems to be Rowling’s favorite word, and which annoyed me probably overmuch because you could always tell the bad guys because they were the ones who smirked.  (The translator uses the word “burlar,” to mock or make fun of.)