Björn recenserade Bring up the bodies av Hilary Mantel
None
4 stjärnor
Spoiler alert: "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived."
We know everyone dies. We know, in quite a few cases, how they die. We may even know why. The question that remains is to what end, at which cost, and in whose interest. What it says about the society built on their judgments.
Bring Up The Bodies continues the story from where Wolf Hall left off, and that's both its strength and its weakness; Mantel continues to write in the same gorgeous, palimpsestish way where everything echoes in all directions at once, where a 16th century soap opera becomes an autopsy of the entire modern-age society to which we still cling, like fleas on a dead (or at least very old) dog. Of course, by this point, the story has become what it is: One long tale of how Anne Boleyn (spoiler!) came to be executed. Of how power justifies its …
Spoiler alert: "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived."
We know everyone dies. We know, in quite a few cases, how they die. We may even know why. The question that remains is to what end, at which cost, and in whose interest. What it says about the society built on their judgments.
Bring Up The Bodies continues the story from where Wolf Hall left off, and that's both its strength and its weakness; Mantel continues to write in the same gorgeous, palimpsestish way where everything echoes in all directions at once, where a 16th century soap opera becomes an autopsy of the entire modern-age society to which we still cling, like fleas on a dead (or at least very old) dog. Of course, by this point, the story has become what it is: One long tale of how Anne Boleyn (spoiler!) came to be executed. Of how power justifies its own actions, of the hypocrisy of a king who publicly woos a concubine can charge his queen with treason for alleged infidelity, of the different paths open to you based on class or gender or cleverness, of the fundamental differences between a country where kings fight on the battlefield at the least provocation under protection of the Holy Virgin and a country where the king sits on a throne, managing an economy, making informed decisions...
...Basically, all the stuff that made Wolf Hall a stunning novel is here too to great effect, but apart from continuing the inevitable plot, Bring Up The Bodies doesn't add a whole lot more. Thomas Cromwell is where he is, still years away from his end, as powerful as he'll get, and the story lacks some of the dynamics that his rise from a nobody that Wolf Hall could draw on.