The Mirror and the Light — Wolf Hall, Book 3

The Mirror and the Light Review

The Wolf Hall trilogy concludes as it began: in Thomas Cromwell’s head, in the present tense, in prose that makes sixteenth-century England feel like a living emergency. Hilary Mantel spent thirty years working toward this book, and it shows — not in any sense of strain or over-elaboration, but in the confidence of every sentence.

The Mirror and the Light covers the years 1536–1540: the execution of Anne Boleyn (the close of Bring Up the Bodies) through the fall and death of Cromwell himself. The historical outcome is known — Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill in 1540 on charges of heresy and treason — and Mantel’s achievement is making four hundred pages of inevitable decline feel suspenseful. We know what will happen. We do not know how Cromwell will meet it, and we find, to our surprise, that we care intensely.

The Prose and the Pronoun

Mantel’s use of the pronoun “he” — always Cromwell, creating an intimacy that breaks whenever another man enters the sentence — is sustained across 800 pages without ever becoming tiresome. The technique has become so completely associated with this trilogy that no one else can use it without acknowledgement. In this final volume she leans into the present tense and Cromwell’s interior weather even more fully, so that the prose itself enacts the way a man at the height of his powers cannot quite see the ground shifting beneath him. The historical canvas is vast — Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the dissolution of the monasteries — and Mantel handles an enormous amount of material with complete control, making theological and political manoeuvring feel as gripping as personal betrayal.

A Novel Haunted by the Dead

What gives the book its peculiar, mournful power is how thoroughly it functions as a ghost story. As Cromwell climbs from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, he is increasingly visited by the dead he helped to destroy — Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers, the cardinal Wolsey who made him — and by memories of his own brutal Putney childhood and his violent father, Walter. Mantel folds these hauntings into the texture of an ageing man taking stock, reckoning with his crimes and his origins as the trap closes. The Cromwell of this volume is deliberately less unified than the ascendant operator of the earlier books; a man faltering cannot bind the world’s details together the way a man rising could, and the novel’s diffuseness is, in part, the point.

The Trilogy’s Achievement

It is impossible to assess this book apart from the whole. Its predecessors, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), both won the Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win it twice — and the first to do so for consecutive volumes of a single story. The Mirror and the Light completes what is now widely regarded as one of the extraordinary literary achievements of our era: a thirty-year reimagining of a man history had flattened into a villain, rendered from the inside with neither exoneration nor condemnation. The trilogy has been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company and for television by the BBC, with Mark Rylance’s Cromwell becoming definitive. Mantel died in 2022, making this the capstone of her career.

The Reinvention of Thomas Cromwell

At the centre of it all is Mantel’s astonishing act of historical sympathy. For centuries Thomas Cromwell was remembered as the cold, grasping enforcer of Henry VIII’s will — the man who engineered the break with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, and dispatched rivals to the scaffold. Mantel’s trilogy does not deny any of this; her Cromwell is capable of ruthlessness and revenge, and The Mirror and the Light lets us watch him orchestrate the destruction of his enemies. But by rendering everything through his consciousness — his prodigious memory, his self-made competence, his grief, his wit, his loyalty to the dead Wolsey — she transforms a stock villain into one of the most fully realised characters in modern fiction. The trilogy’s quiet thesis is that the powerful are neither monsters nor saints but improvisers, building and betraying as circumstance demands, and that to understand a historical figure from the inside is not to forgive him but to recognise him as human. It is this refusal of easy moral verdicts, sustained across three thousand pages, that makes the work feel less like historical fiction than like a complete imaginative world.

Verdict

One of the finest novels of the twenty-first century, and a worthy conclusion to a landmark trilogy. At 784 pages it asks real commitment, and new readers should not start here — the emotional payoff depends entirely on having lived through Cromwell’s rise. But for anyone who has read the first two volumes, The Mirror and the Light delivers a death scene equal in weight to the life that preceded it, observed with the same unflinching, oddly tender attention Mantel extended to her subject from the first page. Begin with Wolf Hall and read all three as a single sustained work — one of the rare cases where a long, demanding trilogy fully repays every hour it asks of you.

It is, simply, one of the high-water marks of the contemporary novel.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A magnificent, mournful close to one of the great achievements in literary historical fiction.

Reading Guides

• Wolf Hall Books in Order: Hilary Mantel