I used to be
able to compartmentalize my time a little better amidst my errands and
commitments. There were some bad days when I could not get my acts together but
most days, between my work schedule and my domestic responsibilities, I was able to fit in the work out, be it yoga, gym or tennis and also
reading, watching movies and hanging out with friends.
These days multi
tasking seems to be a thing of the past, mind is feeling the weight of things
and rising sense of urgency makes it hard to prioritize rationally. I must acknowledge that with the onset of years, gone are the
days when I could just pick up anything to read and plonk myself down without
my reading glasses. If I add up
the time taken in the past one year when I had to walk
the steps to pick up my spectacles from wherever I have left them, I could have read a couple more books.
While “Bring up the Bodies”
is about the fall of Anne Boleyn , in telling a gripping story of terror during
the Tudor age, Hilary Mantel focuses on portraying Thomas Cromwell
as a ruthless, brutal and crafty minister. Cromwell was born a violent
blacksmith’s son from Putney and he ran away from his hometown only to return
27 years later as a lawyer. He is
certainly not a sentimentalist and not a man with whom one can have
inconsequential conversations. King Henry VIII is getting disenchanted with Anne Boleyn as she has failed
to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his
old friends and the noble families of England. The King now has eyes for the
demure Jane Seymour thus his loyal master secretary, Cromwell plots to bring
Anne Boleyn down after having
failed in his attempts to negotiate a voluntary dissolution of the marriage
between Henry and Anne. Although Cromwell is aware that not all the evidence
against the Queen and those who are being tried are true, he has to protect his
own position and do what is necessary to serve Henry the king. The novel also
gives a ghastly account of how Cromwell seizes the opportunity to hound and
kill all those privileged courtiers and aristocrats to avenge the humiliating treatment of his
beloved master, the late Cardinal Wolsey.
This is how
Cromwell is described by Mantel in
her novel.
‘ Thomas
Cromwell is now about
fifty years old. He has a labourer’s body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He
has black hair, graying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which
seem designed to resist rain as well as sun people sneer that his father was an
Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman
too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a
bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for
cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence
is a question all Europe asks. Some says he came up with the Boleyns, the
queen’s family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsley, his
patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his
secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm
from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wood trader , a banker. No one knows where he
has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never
spares himself in the king’s service, he knows his worth and merits and makes
sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms.
He has a way of getting his way, he has a method;he will charm a man or bribe
him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true
interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he
didn’t know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if
they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly.
Knowing this , he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his
indefatigable attention to England’s business. He is not in the habit of
explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But
whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the
threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.
At home in his city house at
Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur,
his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had
pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas ,you mustn’t laugh; and they
had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring
ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had
said, ‘Christ I look like a murderer; and his son, Gregory said, didn’t you
know? ‘
Mantel wrote, ‘He has helped them to their new
world, the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do
without Cromwell too. They have eaten his banquet and now they will want to
sweep him out with the rushes and the bones. But this was his table: he runs on
the top of it, among the broken meats. Let them try to pull him down. They will
find him armoured, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like
a limper to the future. He has laws to write, measures to take, the good of the
commonwealth to serve, and his king; he has titles and honours still to attain,
houses to build, books to read, and who knows, perhaps children to father, and
Gregory to dispose in marriage. It would be some compensation for the children
lost, to have a grandchild. He imagines standing in a daze of light, holding up
a small child so the dead can see it .’
Once again history reminds us not to
trust the politicians and those at
the helm. The novel has taken me much time to finish reading as Mantel’s prose
needs concentration and a moment’s distraction, I have to start the page and
re-read it again.
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