Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze) was “dominated by a form once taboo,” but historical fiction is less a taboo than a literary challenge. When Wolf Hall was being considered for the Booker Prize in 2009 (which it won), the Times noted that its shortlist (which included A. Bring Up the Bodies is more urgent, turning a close lens on Boleyn’s final days. Wolf Hall sprawls from 1500 to 1535, teasing out the historical and psychological conditions that could produce the impenetrable force that was Thomas Cromwell.

Both novels end in swift scenes of execution. Where the first installment, Wolf Hall, chronicles the undoing of Thomas More, Bring Up the Bodies charts the demise of Anne Boleyn. Actions are abrupt in this novel where Mantel takes her time is in cultivating the long spaces between.īring Up the Bodies is the second volume of Mantel’s trilogy that tracks the rise, decline, and ultimate fall of Thomas Cromwell. The line is as efficient as an ax to the head. “Bring up the bodies,” as though these men were already and only that - bodies. Like Mantel’s title, they act as a warning - a prelude - to the queen’s own execution. Only after this declaration are “the bodies” given names: “Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial.” Anne Boleyn’s illicit lovers seem more meat than men while herded to the scaffold.

THE TITLE OF HILARY MANTEL'S latest novel Bring Up the Bodies comes from a line spoken in its final pages.

Bring up the bodies book review