Bring Up the Bodies

‘It’s a very different book [to Wolf Hall], it made different demands […] With Bring up the Bodies we’re covering nine months and we’re concentrating on a period of only three weeks and so there’s an arrow that flies to the target. You know what you have to do, the story gathers pace, momentum, and terrific energy propels it through. What you’re hoping to do is to get the reader turning the pages faster and faster and then coming to the end of it thinking, “Yes, but I’m not quite sure how it happened, I’ll have to read it again, maybe it will look different”.’

Read the full interview here.

‘This is a very remarkable piece of English prose that transcends the work already written by a great English prose writer. This is a bloody story about the death of Anne Boleyn, but Hilary Mantel is a writer who thinks through the blood. She uses her power of prose to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life. She has recast the most essential period of our modern English history; we have the greatest modern English prose writer reviving possibly one of the best known pieces of English history. It is well-trodden territory with an inevitable outcome, and yet she is able to bring it to life as though for the first time.’

Stanley Wells, The New York Review of Books

‘Mantel is a modern storyteller, making no attempt to imitate the language of the period. But she often writes poetically, evoking (or should we say creating?) the beauties and the sordidness, the tenderness and the cruelty of the Tudor world […] Cromwell is entangled in complex webs of intrigue and religious strife, of personal dramas that have international repercussions.’

Jane Hu, The Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Mantel condemns her readers to live in the mind (and witness the psychological acrobatics) of Henry VIII’s most notorious hitman. Seeing history through Cromwell’s eyes gives the reader privileged access to certain secrets, to the conflict behind his silence, behind his famously reticent and impassive mien. Like Robert Browning’s dramatic monologists and Joseph Conrad’s anti-heroes, we’re not meant to judge Cromwell, but to empathize with him […] Mantel’s use of historical fiction is also a critique of it. Bring Up the Bodies gets at the idea that our faith in a country’s history — in a kingdom’s icons — are ultimately retrospective effects of national feeling. One’s idea of the nation, like one’s portrait of the past, is just a story, and likely punctured with gaps, scattered with half-truths, if not full-out lies.’

Laura Miller, Salon

‘Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them […] We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up.’

Wendy Smith, The Washington Post

‘There will be plenty of fresh corpses by the time Hilary Mantel’s narrative completes its mordant course through the nine months required to send Anne Boleyn to the scaffold and clear the way for Henry’s new love, Jane Seymour […] The reader’s problem, deliberately created by Mantel, is that we know Cromwell too intimately to hate him for his terrible deeds. We understand the stark imperative that drives him: Satisfy the king or be thrown to the aristocratic wolves. We feel his bleak acceptance of guilt that is no less onerous for being unavoidable. The past he has shared with us ‘lies about him like a burnt house’ […] The pleasures of Bring Up the Bodies — and they are abundant, albeit severe — reside in Mantel’s artistic mastery. She animates history with a political and psychological acuity equal to Tolstoy’s in War and Peace.’

Matt Burgess, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘A welcome counterpoint to the slacker heroes who stagger through so many contemporary novels, Cromwell trains falcons, adopts orphans, drafts legal briefs, sweet-talks ambassadors, lends money at considerable interest, interrogates witnesses and speaks multiple languages, although he frequently keeps that a secret so he can eavesdrop on servants. He is as cunning and clever as Odysseus – how does a mortal writer inhabit such a man? – and, like Homer, Mantel gives him plenty of grief […] A perfect character for the interior world of fiction, Cromwell as a courtier and conspiracy weaver can rarely say what he means, or even what he thinks. Every interaction thrums with subtext.’