The Mirror and the Light (audiobook)

I was about to say that this 38-hour audiobook was the longest I have ever listened to, but then I remembered The Count of Monte Cristo, which was 46 hours, so. This audiobook was the second-longest I have ever listened to.

It felt a bit strange to be diving into this hot on the heels of the recent TV series, which portrayed the events of this book in its six episodes. But then, a 38-hour listen might contain things that weren’t included in the 6 hours of television… maybe?

First of all, garlands of roses to Ben Miles. Whatever your feelings about Mark Rylance, who played Cromwell on TV, have no fear that Ben Miles, who played him on stage, gives a lesser performance as the reader/narrator here. Furthermore, he also knocks Henry the King out of the park, and Norfolk, and Wriothesley (Call Me) and Rafe, and Stephen Gardiner, and so on. Absolutely brilliant in every respect, and when I think about the hours he put in reading these three books, my mind boggles.

I think these audiobooks are both “unabridged” but also versioned for audiobook purposes. I’m not sure. There’s a chat at the end, between Miles and the late author, but to be honest I found Mantel’s squeaky, creaky voice offputting after 38 hours of Ben Miles, so I didn’t listen. But she says something at the beginning about how she’s worked on the audiobook versions (and had selected Miles as the reader).

One feature that stood out for me across all three books was the way that Mantel used pronouns (and changed her use of pronouns). In Wolf Hall, the first book, she uses he a lot, to refer (usually) to Cromwell, the point of view character, and (inevitably) any other he who is in the picture. I think this was a deliberate stylistic choice, putting us solidly within her hero’s viewpoint and internal monologue. But it could be confusing at times, because you didn’t always know which he was the pronoun’s referent. A kind of alienating effect I suppose, that gave Wolf Hall it’s literary edge.

But then in the subsequent books (the audiobook versions, at least), we get a lot of he, Cromwell, thinks… which feels like a sop to all those who complained about the pronouns in Wolf Hall. Yes, they are out there, and so are Mantel’s defenders. Personally, I liked the feature and the way it worked. But, as I said, by the time you get to The Mirror and the Light, it’s he, Cromwell, or he, Lord Privy seal… I found this compromise in style more jarring than the original, unadorned, pronoun use.

Within these pages, Cromwell reaches the acme of his career. But if the mountain had been a long steep climb on the way up, the way down turns out to be a precipitous drop off a cliff. One day he is Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain, and the next his enemies come for him and he is in the Tower. That it really happened is hard to believe. If you want to know how betrayal feels, read this book.

And while all this is in the TV series, you do feel it much more in the book because there is more detail, and there are things that were skipped over for the purposes of the visual medium. The main thing I think the TV show missed out were the various other candidates for Henry’s fourth* wife. His disappointment in missing out on one in particular most probably fed into the disdain he showed for Anne of Cleves, which was just the latest in several failures he laid at Cromwell’s door.

By all accounts, Mantel dreaded writing about Cromwell’s downfall and death. It’s handled slightly differently here than it was on TV. Much of what is relayed visually on television is internal monologue. I love the words that Mantel put into the mouth of Cromwell’s most loyal French servant, Christophe, at the end. His curse of Henry is probably close to what happened. As Mantel mentioned at the beginnning of the chat at the end, Henry lived seven more years, in pain the whole time. He was just 55, which is young for someone of such wealth and privilege. Bloody Norfolk died in his bed at 80-odd.

Anyway: superb. Bought it for the long journey to France over Christmas, and it has kept me company then and since. I have no idea what to listen to next.

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*This business of “Henry VIII and his six wives” — how did it ever take hold? If we take him at his word, the first marriage doesn’t count, and nor does the fourth. If we approach this from a purely technical viewpoint, his second so-called marriage was invalid and bigamous, and his fourth wasn’t consumated. Knowing what we know about the state of his health, would it be a surprise to learn that his fifth and sixth marriages weren’t consumated, either? So at best, he had four “wives” — and maybe it was only the two.