“The final volume of the Cromwell trilogy, covering Thomas Cromwell from the execution of Anne Boleyn to his own arrest and execution four years later.”
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The Mirror & the Light is Hilary Mantel's 2020 novel, the final volume of the Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, 2009; Bring Up the Bodies, 2012; The Mirror & the Light, 2020) and the closure of what is now widely considered the most important historical-fiction project of the twenty-first century. The 754-page final volume covers the four years from May 1536 (immediately after the execution of Anne Boleyn) through July 1540 (Thomas Cromwell's arrest, his attainder for treason, and his execution at Tower Hill). The Henry VIII court material that the earlier volumes treated with patient irony reaches its narrative peak here: the failed Cleves marriage, the destruction of the monasteries, the political fall of the conservative Howard faction, and Cromwell's gradual loss of the king's favor across the late 1530s.
Mantel's prose discipline reaches its lifetime peak in this final volume. The Cromwell consciousness she had built in the first two novels (the present-tense third-person close, with the pronoun "he" defaulting to Cromwell) is here pushed to a register no other contemporary novelist has equaled: the reader spends 754 pages inside the head of a man slowly recognizing that the political project he has built will not survive him. The Anne of Cleves marriage chapters (Henry's emotional collapse, the diplomatic crisis with the German Lutheran princes, Cromwell's increasingly desperate political maneuvering to avoid the consequences of arranging a marriage the king does not consummate) are some of the most carefully written executive-political prose in contemporary literary fiction. The Tower-of-London chapters that close the novel are appropriately compressed and morally honest about Cromwell's own role in the violence he is now subject to.
Recommended for any reader who has finished Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, as required twenty-first century historical fiction reading, and as the closure of the most important historical-novel project of the contemporary era. The 2024 BBC Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light second-season adaptation with Mark Rylance is excellent and rewards reading the trilogy first. Five stars without reservation. The Ben Miles audiobook is the definitive audio production. Mantel died in 2022 with the Cromwell trilogy as her completed literary project.
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