Nevertheless, it was disappointing in that the lack of such a prize did take attention from what is undoubtedly an astonishing achievement. That Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Mirror and the Light’ did not win the Booker was not sad in itself – there was a worthy winner in the form of ‘Shuggie Bain’ by Douglas Stuart – and after winning a Booker apiece for ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring up the Bodies’ Mantel is hardly in need of literary gravitas. We picked out, with the inner eye, the shape of someone where no one should be – a man creeping along the quays to a skiff where a patient oarsman with a bowed head is paid for silence, and nothing to tell the tale but the small wash and ripple of the Thames the river has seen so much, with its grey blink. We glimpsed the privy chamber gentlemen, sleek in black velvet, invisible except where moonlight plays on a beaded cuff. All spring, we scrutinised Anne the queen, her person, her practices her guards and gates, her doors, her secret chambers. Here he weds three, despite being afflicted with limpness, in at least two senses of the word.‘The scuffling and haste, the sudden vanishing of papers, the shushing, the whisk of skirts and the slammed doors the indrawn breath, the glance, the sigh, the sideways look, and the pit-pat of slippered feet the rapid scribble with the ink still wet a trail of sealing wax, of scent. Henry got through two wives in the first two tales. This time he and Mantel have filleted and streamlined her 883-page book playwright Mike Poulton did the first two. Miles, like many of us, is greyer and grimmer. It’s been seven years since this creative team and many of the returning cast first staged Mantel’s lauded Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the RSC in Stratford, before wowing London and Broadway. Herrin directs with admirable clarity and economy, and the narrative is powered forward by Miles as the upwardly mobile Cromwell and by Nathaniel Parker’s capricious man-child king. This is an urgent, propulsive journey through the dense thickets of Tudor court politics, and a wider rumination on what happens when indispensability becomes a liability rather than an asset. Ompleting a magnificent theatrical hat-trick, actor Ben Miles and director Jeremy Herrin bring Hilary Mantel’s third and final novel about Henry VIII’s fixer Thomas Cromwell triumphantly to the stage.
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