It fascinates because of its ideological warfare and religious conflicts, centering on Henry’s break with Rome and the establishment of the Anglican communion. It was packed with political and personal crises and with multiple threads of violent action. It was exceptionally significant in diverting the course of history and so in shaping the future of the nation. The reign of King Henry VIII has been especially attractive both to historians in the narrowly defined sense of those who, like Polonius, claim to use no art, and to those who draw upon it for fictions of many different kinds. Whether consciously or not, their authors tell stories from particular perspectives they choose who and what to write about they select from the multifariousness of human experience, imposing order on randomness, seeing what they choose to see or what their subconscious minds put before them, setting their stories within a frame of their devising, revealing subjectivity even as they seek to convey an impression of objectivity.Īny account of the past requires artistry in the telling, but those storytellers who proclaim their artifice, melding the stuff of history with the forms and conventions of art, are more honest about the illusory nature of their endeavors than those who seek to convey an impression of impartiality. History books have to have beginnings, middles, and ends. A historian, whether of recent or long-past events, tries to tell it how it was, but the attempt is vain. The desire to capture the past is unquenchable but fruitless.

It happens randomly, goes beyond human control. In the process her book provokes thought about the relationship between fact and fiction, the problems inherent in the attempt both to reconstruct the past and to transmute it into art. Bring Up the Bodies is a sequel to Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall * and in both novels she ambitiously attempts to reconstruct in fictional but credible form a series of crucial events in English history, specifically here those leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. The title of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, we learn late in the narrative, is a legal phrase, the command to court officials instructing them to deliver to their trial men who, because they are accused of treason, are regarded as already dead: “The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’” But the phrase is suggestive too of the march to death, specifically to the scaffold, that is undertaken by many of the book’s characters. Alfredo Dagli Orti/Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Art Archive at Art ResourceĪn eighteenth-century portrait of Anne Boleyn, by an unknown artist

Author of bring up the bodies