Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies is a study - continued from Wolf Hall - of drawing out empathy with a character whom history has despised enough to denigrate and even almost eradicate.
In Thomas Cromwell we have a brute of a man, born of bare-knuckle origins; an autodidact and polymath who is charming, cunning and covetous, who will wield power at all costs even as he knows his empire of influence must eventually come crashing down, who will avenge the suffering of those he himself has loved and betrayed, and whose basic normality and humanity stripped bare of the intrigue of his own bidding and enmeshment is glimpsed in conversations in the kitchen with his cook.
Cromwell comes alive on the page because his is the only character written in 3D, his the only heart and mind we're able to penetrate, he is the sole source of empathy in a cast of hundreds because he alone gifts us his reflexive as well as his public self. And then of course he is written into a language and landscape of modern politics so irrefutably aligned with our received understanding and consumption, via mass media and cable television, of the back-stabbing and intrigue-laden corridors of power.
Personally, I'm not looking forward to Cromwell's demise in the third and final instalment of Mantel's trilogy. And while I believe that it's absolutely correct that we don't judge how good a book is, don't measure it's quality and durability, in terms of our empathy with the protagonist - even, perhaps, our sympathy - you really do only think a book good is it speaks to you: whether in the form of a character, a theme, an issue, a narrative defined by a perspective or an idea with which you feel capable - interested - enough to interact.
In Thomas Cromwell we have a brute of a man, born of bare-knuckle origins; an autodidact and polymath who is charming, cunning and covetous, who will wield power at all costs even as he knows his empire of influence must eventually come crashing down, who will avenge the suffering of those he himself has loved and betrayed, and whose basic normality and humanity stripped bare of the intrigue of his own bidding and enmeshment is glimpsed in conversations in the kitchen with his cook.
Cromwell comes alive on the page because his is the only character written in 3D, his the only heart and mind we're able to penetrate, he is the sole source of empathy in a cast of hundreds because he alone gifts us his reflexive as well as his public self. And then of course he is written into a language and landscape of modern politics so irrefutably aligned with our received understanding and consumption, via mass media and cable television, of the back-stabbing and intrigue-laden corridors of power.
Personally, I'm not looking forward to Cromwell's demise in the third and final instalment of Mantel's trilogy. And while I believe that it's absolutely correct that we don't judge how good a book is, don't measure it's quality and durability, in terms of our empathy with the protagonist - even, perhaps, our sympathy - you really do only think a book good is it speaks to you: whether in the form of a character, a theme, an issue, a narrative defined by a perspective or an idea with which you feel capable - interested - enough to interact.
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