Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies -- the second in a series that began with Wolf Hall -- is a lithe display of the author's craft.  The narrative moves with an easy, sinuous quality -- present tense, in and out of perspectives, tones, moods.  If it is sometimes difficult to figure out who's talking, just remember that an ambiguous "he" always refers to the protagonist of the novel, Thomas Cromwell.

In the New Yorker, James Wood noted that what Mantel does basically is to put period details into what is otherwise a modern narrative, and there is certainly some truth to this. What is so shockingly good about this novel and its predecessor is precisely this quality: it satisfies our desire to see the Renaissance as the Early Modern period, the historical era in which we emerged out of the past and into a world that is recognizably our own.  Mantel makes a very convincing argument along these lines.

In Mantel's estimation, Cromwell is part Machiavelli, part Montaigne, part something more modern altogether.  He's practical, reform-minded, thoughtful, and ruthless.  He's Lyndon Johnson, basically, except we're not yet in that age at which a Johnson could rise to the highest position of authority in the land.  Cromwell was, like Johnson, not to the manor born, but it wasn't until a much later era that one could rise from the masses to rule them all.  If we take Hilary Mantel's version of things, though, what we find is that Cromwell was the one who served as the heretofore unsung architect who modeled the plans upon which that era was built.  The modern world sprang up in his wake.  Again like Johnson, Cromwell is calculating and cold, but the potential good of the common masses is never far from his heart.  Consider:

"Men have died, the track giving way under their feet.  England needs better roads, and bridges that don't collapse.  He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give emplyment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist.  We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat."

Taken out of context, this passage does seem a little easy, a little too consistent with the kind of contemporary Hamiltonian big government stimulus that we have heard much of in the news of late.  In context, though, it fits with Mantel's project, which is to give us a Cromwell who is, essentially, a modern character stuck in a world that has not quite caught up with him.  When Cromwell does seem cold, it's generally because he has little symphathy for political players who mismanage their moves and thus end up in precarious places.  He is engaged in a game of chess that offers only more moves, never a final checkmate.  The penultimate move is, it seems, never the penultimate move -- but rather what turns out to be the first move of a new match.  Readers will know from the start what Cromwell himself is coming increasingly to see: that it's only a matter of time before he makes his own fatal move, finds himself mated as a consequence of his own turns, and the match will be someone else's -- for a while.

In his New Yorker review, Wood also compares Mantel's Cromwell with George Orwell's O'Brien, from 1984, and this assessment is one that I find not so apt.  The two have method in common: both are masterful interrogators who speak much but betray little, revealing only what they want to reveal, and both have the skill of getting others to spill their secrets as easily as you may.  Both have cultivated patience as an art.  They can work with you as long as they need to to get what they want out of you.  Both have the power to spin what we call "reality" (the nebulous and to some extent ungraspable events that occur in real time) into whatever semi-real fiction suits their purposes: they can convince you that their version of the truth is the one that matters because it is the one that history will tell.  Beyond these features, though, there is a fundamental difference of motivation.  With Cromwell, the ends and the means may get confused, and indeed part of what make both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies seem so modern is that the ends and the means are so hard to sort out at times, the truth of any behind-closed-doors situation being slippery in the extreme (1). 

But Cromwell's ends are generally good ones, unlike O'Brien's: he wants to strengthen the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty, thereby securing peace in a kingdom that has been fraught with violent conflicts over the crown for many generations; he wants the people to have a religion that is, relatively speaking, free of abuses and corruption and free of foreign influences that seek to take advantage of the people, as well as promulgated in a language that is sensible; he wants to improve the lives of the common people through the means already identified and through other opportunities for reform; and finally, he wants to serve his master well and, indeed, to grow in wealth and status by doing so.  And is this last not what we moderns seek in our own lives?  Who can begrudge a man who wants his employer to keep him on for another term?  Cromwell always takes pride in a job well done, even if it does leave him with some moral qualms.  The games he plays are high stakes, and all the contestants are aware of this.  O'Brien, by contast, has nothing noble in his ends or his means, and he picks on the already weak and powerless.  He wants power, pure and simple, for himself and (if they even exist) for his equals or superiors.  He delights in and achieves a supreme sense of accomplishment in crushing others, obliterating their sense of self, robbing them of their innermost senses of self. 

Cromwell has no such interest.  He is happy to let others think what they wish, as long as the outward shows match up with what is expedient to his interests and to those of his God, his king, and his people.

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(1) These novels ask: What is the truth, anyway? Making an ethical decision involves assessments of truth, the knowledge of facts, but what do you do when you cannot know truth, and what do you do when the facts seem to contradict each other? How do you make good out of that?