Once I’d managed to extricate myself from the whirlpool of ‘he saids,’ and ascertain that ‘he’ ALWAYS refers to Cromwell, I couldn’t get enough of Hilary Mantel’s sharp, dialogue-dominant prose. She avoids being laden down by old-style phrasing, resulting in a reading experience that is as urgent and exciting as Cromwell’s own life. And why would we want to believe Cromwell was anything other than the villain he has been almost universally painted? Probably because of the tiny details Mantel uses, insignificant in themselves, but which add up to a convincing portrait. Of Anne Boleyn: “What was once sinuous had become angular”; Katherine of Aragon's final resting place: “Well, if you’re dead Peterborough is as good a place as any!”; the Duke of Norfolk "stumps away on his little legs"; Jane Seymour’s eyes “like deep ponds on a still day”; the grooms "dart and swerve like early swallows". It’s the thought world that matters, the mind of the man at the centre of things, the books, the court, the church, the realm . It’s a lesson in how much you can say in so few words. Lo que más me ha gustado del libro, es que me he descubierto en muchas de sus frases. Lápiz rojo en mano (de esos con doble punta, una azul y otra roja), he destacado frases y párrafos enteros que me han hablado desde las páginas del libro como si hubieran salido de mí misma. Frases sobre la pena, los recuerdos y muchos sentimientos que a veces decidimos enterrar para sobrevivir, aunque sea eso mismo lo que nos lastre. Frases que me han llenado los ojos de lágrimas de emoción y que me han hecho correr por sus páginas queriendo al mismo tiempo que se acabe y que no se acabe nunca.

King Henry is lonely but arrogant. He bemoans that he and Thomas Cromwell were never able to go on a friendly outing together to meet the iron masters to see how they crafted weapons. Thomas consoles him by saying they should just imagine how it could have happened. "Let us say the ironmasters gave us their best welcome, and opened their minds to us, and showed us all their secrets." "They must have, ' Henry says. 'No one could keep secrets from me. It is no use to try'". Eagerly awaited and years in the making, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will trace the final four years of Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared, influential figure of his time. Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a diplomat and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age. Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. And oh yes – because the first two books have both individually won the Booker Prize. Of course what we ultimately want from the final book is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy but it is hard not to get a teensy bit excited about the fact that she could win the Booker again. But more about that later – the book hasn’t even been released yet!

Diaries & Calendars

The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?

Not having read the first book since it was first released, and plodding my way through it at the time, this was the perfect way to work my way through the whole story from start to finish. Then again, some plot points obviously won't punch as hard if things are accelerated (about 2-3-fold). And I do like all the stuff that makes historical fiction lengthy - the setting and little details and everything. And I liked the first two narrators more than the last one. The sting of hunger is not callous, but undeniable. The violence of history is stunning: “there are no rules to guide us”. Just so. The first, Wolf Hall, was the best. I could not put any of them down, though. Got the first two from the library; had to actually buy the third (The Mirror and the Light) when the library's HOLD list would have meant a wait of . . . months at least.May, 1536. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, is dead. As the axe drops, Thomas Cromwell emerges from the bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. No quiero contar mucho del argumento (podéis encontrar el oficial al final del post), porque quiero que resulte un descubrimiento tan especial para vosotros como lo ha sido para mí. Se trata una historia intimista y auténtica, llena de sueños, de literatura y de cuentos, que gira en torno a una desgracia familiar a través de la que vemos crecer a la protagonista y a los personajes que la rodean. Una oda a la literatura y a la vida, que en el caso de Carolina (la protagonista) son la misma cosa, porque es a través de los libros que nos puede contar su historia y la de sus sueños que se convierten en realidad.

In a way, this is a whole new "genre" for me. This is a rather well edited abridged version (I of course missed this on Libby at first). I didn't really "get" abridged recordings before, especially not abridged versions of fiction. Did this trilogy change anything? The third book has the high quality of the previous 2, so will be a very strong contender in this years prizes. The trilogy consists of three historical political novels set during the reign of Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell. I have just finished the last one, The Mirror and the Light, and even the ending is not disappointing. Of course, you know what's going to happen to the main character from the onset, but it's still riveting.In her Booker Prize acceptance speech in 2009, Mantel said: ‘I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years. I couldn’t begin until I felt secure enough to say to my publisher just what a publisher always wants to hear: “this will take me several years, you know”. But they took it on the chin. Readers and critics alike found Mantel’s approach an original and welcome addition to Tudor fiction, as it offered something genuinely different and unfamiliar. Historian Thomas Penn, author of Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, says that while ‘the Tudors have always been box-office… Hilary Mantel’s novels have allowed people to imagine them in a new light’. While Wolf Hall was the book that brought Mantel huge international acclaim, and the 2009 Booker Prize, she had already been writing for many years with a number of accolades to her name. This is just one similarity that offered me what felt like real insight into the historical moment that we have just lived through/are now living through. And the view was ugly and pathetic in an utterly mundane way. All this talk of "unprecedented" this and that over the past 4 years? Nonsense. This is still the same old story repeating itself. That's what history or very good fiction or (as in this case) a mix of the two can do: it can let you see your own moment in time as though you are looking at it from far off. And there are things you can see from far off that you can't see from up close. It took a while to hit her stride. She was drawn to historical fiction from the start, but, as she said in her 2017 Reith Lectures, ‘I was subject to a cultural cringe. I felt I was morally inferior to historians and artistically inferior to real novelists, who could do plots.’ In the mid-Seventies she wrote a novel about the French Revolution, but was unable to find publisher to take it on. At the time, historical fiction, she said later, ‘wasn’t respected or respectable’. One agent turned it down, she said, because they expected that it was ‘bound to be about ladies with high hair’. (The book, A Place of Greater Safety, was eventually published in 1992.)