Bring Up the Bodies 

By Hilary Mantel

432 pages

Published May 8, 2012

For the month of August, the Elder Mules selected Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.

Mantel’s name was familiar to me, but I knew nothing about her books. I worried that this one might be one of those novels that is better suited for the book clubs that our spouses belong to. So, I googled it. Turns out it’s a historical novel – and a good one. It’s the second book in a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. The other two books in the trilogy are Wolf Hall (2009) and The Mirror and the Light(2020). Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker Prize.

I’ve always been interested in the story of Henry VIII and his eight wives, one of whom, Anne Boleyn, was famously beheaded. What brought about her downfall? And what did Thomas Cromwell have to do with it? Bring Up the Bodies does a detailed and entertaining job of explaining all that.

Critical Reception 

* “Bring Up the Bodies (the title refers to the four men executed for supposedly sleeping with Anne) isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but it’s astringent and purifying, stripping away the cobwebs and varnish of history, the antique formulations and brocaded sentimentality of costume-drama novels, so that the English past comes to seem like something vivid, strange, and brand new.” (Charles McGrath)

* “Historical fiction has many pitfalls, multiple characters and plausible underwear being only two of them. How should people talk?… How much detail – clothes, furnishings, appliances – to supply without clogging up the page and slowing down the story?… Mantel sometimes overshares, but literary invention does not fail her: She’s as deft and verbally adroit as ever.” (Margaret Atwood)

* “[The book’s] ironic ending will be no cliffhanger for anyone even remotely familiar with Henry VIII’s trail of carnage. But in Bring Up the Bodies it works as one. The wonder of Ms. Mantel’s retelling is that she makes these events fresh and terrifying all over again.” (Janet Maslin)