Editors Reads Verdict
Bring Up the Bodies is tighter, darker, and in some ways more disturbing than Wolf Hall — a novel about the mechanics of a judicial murder rendered from the point of view of the man who orchestrates it. Mantel's second Booker Prize is fully deserved: the book is a masterwork of historical and moral compression.
What We Loved
- More compressed and propulsive than Wolf Hall — the shorter length focuses the narrative perfectly
- Cromwell's moral complexity reaches its most uncomfortable and most interesting point
- The trial of Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers is forensically rendered and morally devastating
- Won the Man Booker Prize — the second for Mantel and for any Booker sequel
Minor Drawbacks
- Requires familiarity with Wolf Hall to access the full emotional weight
- The compression that gives the book its power also means some historical context is assumed rather than provided
Key Takeaways
- → The law is a tool of power — the trial of Anne Boleyn is a demonstration of how legal process can be made to produce a predetermined result
- → Cromwell's loyalty to Wolsey's memory motivates him to use Anne's fall to destroy the men who humiliated Wolsey — revenge dressed as service
- → Power at the Tudor court is inseparable from the willingness to do things you cannot undo
- → The condemned understand the system better than anyone — their clarity is the novel's moral centre
- → Justice and legality are different things, and a man can serve the second while knowing he has betrayed the first
| Author | Hilary Mantel |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Fourth Estate / Picador |
| Pages | 352 |
| Published | May 10, 2012 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Readers who have completed Wolf Hall; fans of serious historical fiction, Tudor history, and novels that explore the intersection of political power and individual conscience. |
The Second Fall
Bring Up the Bodies begins in the mid-1530s, with Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn already turning. The king’s eye has moved to Jane Seymour, a quiet young woman of the Seymour family. Anne has not produced a male heir. Henry wants a solution, and Cromwell — who rose partly through Anne’s patronage — must find one. The novel’s central action is the construction of a case against Anne: treason, adultery, conspiracy, and — the most terrible charge — incest with her brother George.
Mantel does not pretend that the charges are true. The novel’s moral horror is that Cromwell knows they are not true, or at least knows that the evidence for them is constructed rather than discovered, and proceeds anyway. He has reasons — among them the desire to use Anne’s fall to destroy the men who humiliated Cardinal Wolsey, his old master — but the reasons do not make the action less damning. Bring Up the Bodies is the novel in which Cromwell’s moral account begins to come due.
The Mechanics of a Judicial Murder
The trial sequences are the novel’s greatest achievement. Mantel renders the mechanics of 16th-century English law — the indictments, the interrogations, the calibration of testimony under pressure — with the precision of someone who has studied how judicial murder actually operates. The accused know what is happening. They understand that the process has been designed to reach a conclusion that precedes it. Some of them fight; some capitulate; some achieve a kind of dignity in the full knowledge that dignity will not save them.
Anne herself is rendered with more sympathy and complexity in this volume than in Wolf Hall, where she appeared primarily as a political actor seen through Cromwell’s assessing intelligence. Here, as her situation becomes desperate, her humanity comes into full relief — her wit, her courage, her fury at what is being done to her in the name of the law.
Cromwell’s Reckoning
The novel’s final section, in which Cromwell reflects on what he has done and where it has left him, is Mantel’s most morally precise writing. Cromwell does not repent — he is not a character given to repentance — but he perceives clearly the nature of the transaction he has completed. He has served the king at the cost of men who were probably innocent and a woman who was certainly not guilty of the crimes for which she was executed. His position is stronger than it has ever been. And he is alone in a way that Wolf Hall did not quite require him to confront.
A Second Prize and a Series in Full Command
That Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker Prize in its own right — making Mantel the first author to win the prize twice and the first for a sequel — reflects the fact that it is not a continuation but an independent achievement. The compression that comes from a narrower focus (roughly eighteen months of history rather than the decade-plus of Wolf Hall) gives the novel a momentum and urgency that make it, for many readers, the more satisfying of the two.
Our rating: 4.4/5
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