The Mirror & the Light is the last, and best, of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. It is the only one that did not win a Booker Prize, somehow. I found it a seamless transition from the previous two books, but one that got increasingly complicated and dark as it went on. The world--Tudor England during Henry VIII's cycling through wives--was as vivid as always, if a bit more explicitly violent. The strengths of the previous novels remained. There were short scenes peppered with lively dialogue. There were impressionistic tableaus of English life. There were fleshed-out, complex characters. There were beautiful vignettes and snippets of poems and song. And at the center, there was Henry VIII's most talented subject, Thomas Cromwell.
In the previous books, Cromwell was almost super-human. He was powerful, tender, learned, pragmatic, blunt, honest, and funny. The will of the king was often bent to Cromwell's. Despite his common birth and against great resistance, he could make things happen. Somewhere in The Mirror & the Light though, a few hundred pages in, things begin to slip. Whether his advanced age or the impossibility of holding together a religious reformation with a flighty king, Cromwell's successes begin to unravel. Things move slowly, slowly, and then all at once (like Hemingway's bankruptcy line), and the conclusion is not surprising, but still weighty and affecting.
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