Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (5 page)

Everything you think you know about these events turns out to be inadequate to the discoveries made by this fictional work. By centering the narrative on Thomas Cromwell—a blacksmith’s son who rose to become one of the king’s most powerful advisors, and whose great-grandnephew eventually became the Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell—Mantel gives us a whole new perspective on the era and its machinations. Cardinal Wolsey, with whom Cromwell got his start, becomes a much more complicated and appealing figure than usual, and Sir Thomas More becomes downright hateful: not at all the saintly martyr portrayed in
A Man for All Seasons
and in Catholic theology generally, but a ruthless, narrow-minded egotist who cannot imagine the possibility of his own error.

Mantel is a great hater, and part of that greatness lies in the subtlety and modulation of her hatred. When she shows us More being casually cruel to his long-suffering wife (he insults her in Latin, a language she doesn’t know, while she serves dinner to his guests), we think we will never forgive this man. And yet at the end of the novel, when Cromwell repeatedly visits the imprisoned More in an effort to get him to capitulate to the king and save his own life, we find ourselves adopting the same grudging admiration that Cromwell feels toward this now pitiful figure. It is with More’s execution, in fact, that the novel ends, even though much still lay ahead in both Thomas Cromwell’s and King Henry the Eighth’s careers.

This
in medias res
approach is an essential aspect of Mantel’s technique. She expects us to know things: that the king eventually executed Anne Boleyn, for instance, who is shown here only as a powerfully intelligent, destiny-controlling figure; that his subsequent wife was Jane Seymour, who merely gets a few brief though pointed cameos in the novel; and that all the children of his first three wives (first Edward, then Mary, then Elizabeth) ruled England in turn, despite his efforts to cut the two girls out of the line of succession. All these events take place outside and after the novel we hold in our hands, and we can certainly read
Wolf Hall
without knowing about them, but the fictional story becomes much richer if we are acquainted with the historical one as well.

The triumph of Mantel’s novel, though, lies in its portrayal of Thomas Cromwell—a triumph that is all the more surprising when you consider that most historians have presented him as the Lavrenty Beria or Heinrich Himmler of his era, the evil henchman responsible for implementing his employer’s violent wishes. In Mantel’s much more sympathetic account, we witness at close hand Cromwell’s public and private political negotiations, his astute business methods, his intelligent, multilingual dealings with all sorts of Europeans. We live with him in his house, watch him hire and train his servants, and share his sorrow as his wife and then his daughters die of the plague. His poor and violent background, his self-made and sometimes self-obscuring character, make him by far the most appealing figure in the crowd of devious nobles surrounding Henry the Eighth. All of this, needless to say, depends heavily on the language Mantel has devised to present her tale—a language that is neither archaic nor modern, neither ironically remote nor fully enmeshed in events, neither abstract nor individually nuanced, but one that floats, impossibly, at an invisible point equally distant from all of these.

I finished the rather hefty
Wolf Hall
wishing it were twice as long as it is. Torn away from that sixteenth-century world, in which I had come to know the engaging, pragmatic Thomas Cromwell as if he were my own brother—as if he were
myself
—I found myself turning to any available sources to find out more about him. I read each new piece of information about Tudor England with fresh and sharpened eyes. I thought back to Shakespeare, and wondered how purposely he was embodying the problem undermining Queen Mary’s sovereignty—the question of whether a marriage to a deceased brother’s wife is a real marriage or not—when he wrote
Hamlet
under the reign of her antagonist and half sister, Queen Elizabeth. I even found myself visiting the Frick Museum, gazing at length on the Holbein portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell that are hanging on its walls. But none of this, however instructive, made up for my feeling of loss, of having been ejected from a world that I could no longer inhabit because the final doors had now closed on me.

One would think that a sequel would solve this problem, and so it was with particular eagerness that I picked up the next volume in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.
Bring Up the Bodies
is a well-told tale, worth reading for its own merits, but it is not as good as
Wolf Hall
. This should not have surprised me. Time after time, having finished the marvelous first novel in a series—Arnold Bennett’s
Clayhanger
, Rebecca West’s
The Fountain Overflows
, L. P. Hartley’s
The Shrimp and the Anemone
, Olivia Manning’s
The Great Fortune
, Edward St. Aubyn’s
Never Mind
, and many others, too numerous to list—I have rushed to the second and third volumes to gobble up more about the characters, only to find myself disappointed. This is never a learning experience: you cannot refrain from taking the next step, any more than you can refrain from watching the episode that comes after a cliffhanger on TV. But though your curiosity may be satisfied, your much-raised expectations of pleasure will not be. With a handful of exceptions (Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels and Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series come to mind), the sequels to a great first novel are bound to be distinctly inferior. The characters have grown up, or reformed, or otherwise lost their edge. The tale-telling has become dutiful, perhaps even a bit weary.

To these standard problems, Hilary Mantel’s
Bring Up the Bodies
adds a few of its own. The author is stuck with the fact that the later career of Thomas Cromwell is more sordid and less engaging than his early struggles. Also, since the story of Anne Boleyn is already more familiar to us than the rest of the Henry the Eighth tale, Mantel has to cope with the reader’s own expectations about the plot. And the unusual style she invented to transmit both historical distance and narrative intimacy (in particular, the use of an undesignated “he” to refer to Cromwell) has by now, perhaps, begun to strike us as slightly mechanical. None of this means that the novel is actively bad; I don’t think Mantel is capable of writing a bad novel. But it almost makes me wish—against my own readerly interests—that she had chosen to end her story in midstream, leaving me with that terrific, inconsolable hunger.

*   *   *

One can derive this sense of longing from narrative artworks that are not literature. I felt something very much like it after I finished watching the television series
The Wire
. I also felt it at the end of
The Best of Youth
, the six-hour Italian movie that first showed on Italian television. Very few standard-length movies are capable of creating this sensation of loss; it requires the Wagnerian length and the Dickensian intimacy of television, I think. And most television is not good enough to accomplish it. But when it does happen, as in these two cases, you get something that has a kind of literary profundity.

Here, I suppose, is where the definition of “literature” gets fuzzy. You could insist that it must depend on the written word. But even television shows—that is,
good
television shows—begin as scripts. If those scripts need full performance to bring them to life, well, so do most plays; and since we are willing to count drama as literature, why not television as well? Besides, it may be that the
written
word is not as essential as we think. Consider Homer, who had no written text at all, but simply sang his verses to those assembled around him, relying on them to memorize and transmit the poems. Or what about fairy tales? They may have been gathered together by the Brothers Grimm and the like, but they existed in orally disseminated form long before that. At what point in their history, if ever, do such works become literature?

Certainly there is a great deal of literature that partakes of fairy tale; or, to put it another way, fairy-tale elements manage to make their way into a number of highly respectable novels, stories, and plays. The marriage plot—that whole century-long tradition, extending from Jane Austen, who delighted in giving us the marriage, to Henry James, who delighted in withholding it—stems in part from the fairy tale of the princess and her multiple suitors (a tradition that Shakespeare also drew on, in the three-casket subplot of
The Merchant of Venice
). Other works of literature are clearly based on the prince’s quest for an almost-impossible object, a plot which underlies not only Don Quixote’s explicitly chivalric escapades, but also Julien Sorel’s relentless pursuit of higher social status in Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
, or Marcel’s interminable search for a satisfying love affair in Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. Then there is the story of the provincial tailor’s or cobbler’s son who makes good among the aristocracy in the big city, a version of which lies behind both Balzac’s
Lost Illusions
(which propels its protagonist, Lucien, from a small French town to bustling Paris) and Trollope’s
Phineas Finn
(which transfers its title character from rustic Ireland to a London career in Parliament). My own favorite incarnation of the fairy-tale plot involves the collection of devices or talents or provisions or skills that are handed to the hero at the beginning of his journey and must be used—we know not how, until they appear at precisely the right moment—before his story reaches its end. There is something extremely satisfying about this process, whether it be the use of the characters’ unique talents in Frank Baum’s
The Wizard of Oz
, or the application of objects saved from shipwreck in Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
and Verne’s
The Mysterious Island
, or the necessary collaboration of the individual police officers, each of whom has a special skill, in the ensemble casts of Fred Vargas’s
policiers
. Part of the pleasure has to do with a sense of efficiency, of materials exactly allocated and completely used. Another part has to do with a sense of inevitability, the feeling that
someone
knew where we were headed all along, even if we and the characters did not.

There are novelistic plots that play on this sense of inevitability and then give it an extra twist at the end, as if to satisfy us by meeting our expectations and also by evading them. I’m thinking, in particular, of the wonderful nineteenth-century novel
The Maias
, by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós. The plot of the novel occupies practically the whole century, covering the lives of three generations of the wealthy and colorful Maia family, though centering on Carlos Maia, its youngest member. We get details about his upbringing on his grandfather’s country estate; we see the rural lives of the villagers who surround him there as well as the more sophisticated lives of the young men he meets as a student. We follow their efforts to undertake various cultural, artistic, and political projects (including founding a magazine) in a way that seems typical of young people in that era and that class, and yet particularly Portuguese at the same time. Nineteenth-century Lisbon is rendered in all its tinseled glory as a provincial capital aping London or Paris, with its own silly aristocracy and its own conventional manners. All this is done with tenderness and wit, and the book would be worth reading purely as a portrait of a fascinating society that we Anglophones know little about.

But the heart of the story, the plotline that keeps us compulsively reading, lies in the love affair Carlos conducts with the woman of his dreams, a dark-eyed beauty who happens to be married to someone else. Those of us with an eye for melodrama can spot the resolution coming from afar: de Queirós drops sufficient hints along the way to suggest to his more alert readers that this beautiful young woman will turn out to be Carlos’s long-lost and previously unknown sister. We anxiously await the tragedy that will result when Carlos himself finds out, assuming that the discovery will mark the book’s disastrous denouement. That moment of revelation arrives, but it is not the end. The author surprises us by concluding his book with a leap into the future, allowing decades to pass and awarding his main character a distanced view of these calamitous events from the calm perspective of the century’s end. Carlos has survived, as have his close friends, his capital city, and his country—all in altered form, of course, but recognizably connected with who they were in their callow youth. It is an astonishing feat of authorial wisdom, this replacement of the expected melodrama with a sense of wry nostalgia; it is as if we were expecting a painting in primary-colored acrylics and were instead handed a beautiful pastel with the most subtle gradations of hue. The shock to our system is bracing, and salutary. We too feel that we have survived something, and have moved onto a plane that is suspended slightly above normal life, where we are contemplative and amused but still capable of being interested in what goes on around us. This is old age at its best, I suppose, and de Queirós renders it perfectly.

Not all plots are required to reach this kind of conclusion, or for that matter any kind of conclusion at all. There are plots in which nothing, essentially, happens. (Most of Beckett falls into this category.) There are plots which consist largely of thoughts rendered into words—stream-of-consciousness novels like Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
and Thomas Bernhard’s
The Loser
, but also mystery novels that specialize in showing the detective’s lucubrations. Plot need not be profuse or busy. It can linger on a few memorable moments; it can be stark, or scarce, or minimal.

Yet when plot is largely absent, as it is, say, in certain
nouveaux romans
or imagistic poems, we tend to fill the gaps ourselves, with our own pattern-creating minds. For we are plotting creatures, we humans, and we like to be told a story that goes somewhere. We like to sense the connections between seemingly disparate events, even though we may recognize that real disparities rarely resolve so neatly. Life often foils us in this respect, with its coincidences and its dead ends. We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential. And good literature, like
The Maias
, meets us only halfway.