michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

What a fabulous book!

It is rare that I anticipate a book as eagerly as this one; rare that a sequel can live up to the expectations of the first book; rare that historical fiction can grip me quite so intently! But Mantel manages all this in Bring Up The Bodies which, in my opinion, outshines the original Wolf Hall.

The original book had charted the rise of Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn and the fall from grace of Cardinal Wolsey. This book, in which Cromwell is at the height of his powers, charts the fall, trial and execution of Anne Boleyn and her replacement by Jane Seymour.

Is that a spoiler? It's historical, there was never any doubt about the outcome. If so, what's the point of reading it? The ending is mapped out by my (somewhat cloudy) GCSE History; the plot twists and turns that, say, C. P. Sansom relies on cannot appear here. The delight is in the people, the life, the humanity that Mantel's language brings to what had been just names before! She invites us into a new and vibrant world populated by some of the most complete people that I have ever met in fiction.

In fact, Mantel's language explicitly does invite us in: the present tense, the occasional first person plural pronoun that places her world before "us" as "we" explore it. By instinct, these overly writerly techniques to bridge the 500 years gap between us and the Tudors would usually irk me. But here they work exceptionally well.

Let us consider the title: "Bring up the bodies" is the cry to bring the prisoners out of the Tower to face their trial. But Cromwell is also haunted - so so haunted - by ghosts that it is almost tearjerking. The opening image is of him hawking with hawks named for his dead children. We are told that "when the house is quiet... then dead people walk about" in Austin Friars; the Christmas costume that he had made ten year previously for his daughter reminds him "Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather's breath from you"; following an argument with Henry, he recalls advice his father gave him and "is glad his father is with him"; the final image in the book is of a page turned over and displaying the remnants of "the cardinal's writing... so he can see the dead hand that inscribed them". In fact, despite being dead, Wolsey's presence is so frequent and integral to Cromwell he deserves to be cited in the dramatis personae at the start of the book.

This is a book resonant with imagery that is redolent with symbolism but also rooted in the world if the book. The hawks circling their prey in the opening pages parallels Anne's waiting women circling and betraying her; the proverb book given by Henry to Jane and still bearing the jewel encrusted "A" for Anne and the marks of the "K" beneath it like a palimpsest is hugely and wonderfully evocative of the effect on our lives of all our past encounters.

And finally onto the big question: how is Cromwell himself portrayed? Enigmatic and shadowy in history, "sleek, plump and densely inaccessible" as Mantel describes him. Here, he is perhaps less sympathetically portrayed than in Wolf Hall. He is certainly utterly imposing: the moment when he is beside the injured King and

"seems to body out and fill all the space around the fallen man. He sees himself, as if he were watching from the canvas above: his girth expands, even his height. So that he occupies even more ground. So that he takes up more space, breathes more air, is planted and solid when Norfolk careers into him, twitching, trembling. So he is a fortress on a rock, serene, and Thomas Howard just bounces back from his walls, wincing, flinching and blethering."

This is almost a Gandalf The Grey moment facing the Balrog!

And his conduct of the interviews with Anne's women and then her four alleged suitors and her brother is utterly chilling. He shows an utter lack of compulsion or interest in whether the five men were guilty as charged. As he tells us: he was charged to find guilty men; and the men he found were guilty of something. When Gregory asks "Were they guilty?" he meant had they slept with Anne; Cromwell heard the question asking if the court had found then guilty.

Nor is he trustworthy: as he said to Thomas Wyatt, he cannot split himself into two men, one his friend and the other the King's man. Nothing can be said to him in confidence that it will not be used against you later.

Yet he is still wholly compelling! His utter self assurance is refreshing; his splashes of humanity and disregard for others who mock Anne even as the preparations for her execution are made; his concern for his son; and, above all his loneliness and his ghosts all humanise him

You know what it's like... Unless it's just me...

You see a book on a shelf, perhaps at a Service Station, maybe on the M5.

Something about the cover appeals; the blurb interests you; the historical context intrigues you.... And yet for some reason (let's call them children and imagine the reasons were at the point hitting each other and screaming) you don't get the chance to buy it.

For weeks you keep an eye out for the book, it doesn't appear. Eventually, your Audible.com credits come up and you get the chance....

Excitement mounts...

Anticipation peaks...

And it just never quite hits the mark.

I don't think that narrator helped - Jonathan Aris in this case - as his voice was rather monotonous. But I just didn't get the story! Well, I understood the story but I didn't get the story. Get me?!

The story revolves around the cemetery at Les Innocents in Paris which, having been packed with corpse upon carcass upon carrion upon cadaver for decades is spilling into neighbouring houses and poisoning the air of Paris. In itself, this is a potentially wonderful image of the superating wound in the heart of pre-revolutionary France.

Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young Engineer is instructed to remove the cemetery. And herein lies my problem with the book. I didn't like Jean-Baptiste; I didn't care about him. Half way through the book, avoiding spoilers, a dramatic event befalls him. And I still didn't care for him. He fell in love. I still didn't care for him. he was plunged by events into the role of a hero. Cared? Still no. And I think that the "plunged by events" is the problem: he was so damned passive! Things happened to him. A classic example is when Jean-Baptiste meets the organist Armand who whirls him through Paris, cons him into buying a pistachio suit. He does not demur, does not decline, neither agrees not disagrees with anyone. Later, Armand whirls him again into becoming "Beche", an unwitting activist for the Party of the Future.

There are good things here, don't get me wrong. Jeanne the Sexton's daughter was very sweet; the gang of miners who actually toiled to remove the bones were simultaneously very earthy (somehow with their pipes and whoring reminding me of Moby Dick's Stubb) and simultaneously somehow fey and otherworldly. Now that's not a bad trick to pull off!

There are days, those dark days, when you sit down and realise that you've had the same meal for three days ...

I've just sat down and realised that the last three books I've read are all historical fiction.

Bring Up The Bodies by Mantel, Pure by Andrew Miller and now Sovereign by C. J. Sansom.

Sovereign is the third of the Matthew Shardlake novels and certainly stronger than its predecessor Dark Fire. Dark Fire revolved around the - frankly preposterous - notion of a vastly powerful flammable chemical being unearthed by Henry VIII's agents. Here, the plot is more human and credible.

Well, "plot" isn't quite right: plots, plural. There is the original plot device of Shardlake being dispatched to York to meet up with the King's Northern Progress in order to hear legal cases; and, almost incidentally, to ensure that a captured traitor, Sir Edward Broderick, remains alive until he can be transported to London to be tortured. The moral dilemma of ensuring a man remains alive solely to face torture and execution are raised through the book but not exactly delved into.

Once placed in York, Shardlake is in the vicinity when a glazer is killed. A box of suspicious papers are found in the dead man's house. The papers are glimpsed by Shardlake before he is knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant who flees with the papers.

In the words of Lemony Snicket, a series of unfortunate and deadly and - increasingly bizarre - incidents befall Shardlake as he becomes the victim of repeated assassination attempts. These may or may not be connected with the papers in the box.

Meanwhile Jack Barak - the Watson to Shardlake's Holmes - starts a dalliance with a girl in the Queen's employ; Shardlake befriends a local Yorkist lawyer; the Queen becomes embroiled with gossip; plots multiply and intertwine and writhe around each other. And at the heart of the novel is the King, the Sovereign of the title, the focus of the rebellion.

It is the massive mouldering image of the king that dominates the novel's imagination despite the scarcity of pages devoted to him. We only see him once as the Progress reaches York's Council at Fulford Cross. And even then we see only fragments due to Shardlake's grovelling before him. We hear his voice humiliating the lawyer, we see his height and bulk; we smell the rot of his ulcerating rotting fetid noisome sore on his leg. The image of him rutting upon the child-like Queen Catherine is mentioned more than once. The stench of the King's injury is recalled when trying to identify a poison later.

And the prophecy of the downfall of Henry VIII describes him as the Mouldwarp.

What has always concerned me with historical fiction is still here. I like my history to be accurate: I am nervous about looking an arse by trotting out some fiction as historical fact at a quiz someday!! And I like my fiction to be real - to give the sense of a real place and real characters living and loving and breathing through it. With the exception of Henry's leg, I didn't feel the reality of the world despite the small details mentioned such as Shardlake's steel mirror and the rather laboured use of the word "shit".

I did, however, feel quite a shock on the plot twist when Shardlake returned to London and I was quite surprised by how concerned I felt for him.