Across the literary pages | 7 May 2012

Hilary Mantel dominates the bank holiday books pages. Bring Up The Bodies, the sequel to the Booker winning Wolf Hall, will be published this Thursday, and the acclaim has already begun.

Mantel has been interviewed for the Telegraph by the renowned Tudor historian Thomas Penn. They talked of history and fiction, very carefully and very slowly: Penn says that Mantel speaks in ‘perfect paragraphs’. The Telegraph also carries an extract from Bring Up The Bodies. It has the searing pace and all the subtleties that characterised Wolf Hall. Cromwell travels to see Katherine of Aragon, and the two speak of the king’s latest woman problem, in this case Anne Boleyn’s childlessness. Katherine remarks, ‘A queen, and she calls herself a queen, must live and suffer under the world’s eye’ – a statement that resounds in the 21st century just as it did in the sixteenth, perhaps more so if the definition of queen is widened to include the stars of our society. Power has changed markedly, but its caprices and responsibilities have not.

Reviews of Bring Up The Bodies have been pitched somewhere between reverence and ecstasy. Andrew Motion, writing in the Times (£), concludes that:

‘Bring Up The Bodies, meanwhile, is a richly self-sufficient pleasure. Mantel’s particular and original talent is to stand outside her characters, and display them to her readers as though she were taking us on an expert talking-tour of the Tudor room in the National Portrait Gallery; at the same time, she makes us feel we are a part of their lives.’

Margaret Atwood, writing in the Guardian, says:

‘We read historical fiction for the same reason we keep watching Hamlet: it’s not what, it’s how. And although we know the plot, the characters themselves do not. Mantel leaves Cromwell at a moment that would appear secure: four of his ill-wishing enemies, in addition to Anne, have just been beheaded, and many more have been neutralised. England will have peace, though it’s “the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home”. But really Cromwell is balancing on a tightrope, with his enemies gathering and muttering offstage. The book ends as it begins, with an image of blood-soaked feathers.’