RaveThe AtlanticThe one-person perspective gives the books their grip, because Cromwell’s charisma is never allowed to dissipate. At the same time, Mantel has plenty of room for invention ... And yet, Cromwell is like us. At least, it feels that way ... The paradox of Mantel’s historical trilogy is that Cromwell’s anachronisms strengthen his credibility as a character. He has a more highly developed class-consciousness than a man of his era ought to have. But we are willing to suspend disbelief, because his uncanny powers of observation have been so well established that he transcends his world, immersed in it as he is ... Mantel changes her prose style to accommodate her more haunted Cromwell. In the earlier novels, the sentences were blunt and propulsive; in this one, she slows them down, unlaces them. The language is more elegiac, almost mystical, though as precise as ever. It now has to trace the wavering edges of a once well-defined self ... By the end of these three books, we have been with Cromwell as he lived or revisited most of his life, and we haven’t exhausted his mystery. Nor, obviously, has he. It is a testament to Mantel’s demiurgic imagination, her ability to multiply ambiguities, that by the time Cromwell achieves something like self-knowledge, there is more to him than it is possible to know.
