Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies is Hilary Mantel's 2012 novel, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy and the second Booker Prize winner of the project. The setting is a tighter window than Wolf Hall (the novel covers only nine months, from September 1535 to the May 1536 execution of Anne Boleyn), and the structural effect is the most concentrated and most morally serious historical novel of the twenty-first century. Cromwell engineers Anne's fall on Henry VIII's behalf: the legal construction of treason charges against five men, the swift trials, the executions. Mantel is not interested in whether the charges were true; she is interested in the operational and moral mechanics of state violence executed by an administrator who has decided this is what the work requires.

What makes Bring Up the Bodies the strongest novel of Mantel's career is the further refinement of the close-third Cromwell consciousness she had built in Wolf Hall. The novel is shorter (410 pages versus 650), more focused, more morally severe. The Anne Boleyn execution sequence is one of the most carefully written historical-novel passages in contemporary fiction. The Jane Seymour rise is rendered as the political-administrative achievement it actually was. Cromwell himself becomes legible across the novel as a tragic protagonist in the proper Greek sense: a man whose virtues (loyalty, methodical care, decisive action) are also his fatal flaws.

Recommended for any reader who finished Wolf Hall, as a required text in any contemporary historical-fiction conversation, and as the rare middle volume of a trilogy that exceeds its predecessor. Five stars without reservation. Read The Mirror & the Light (2020) next to finish the trilogy.