Deborama’s Books — Some books I’ve read lately

Damien Lewis (Henry VIII) Mark Rylance (Cromwell) and Claire Foy (Anne Boleyn) in the PBS drama Wolf Hall

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (5 stars)
This book, being the long-awaited third in a trilogy, the first two volumes of which won enormous acclaim, needs no explanation for why I read it. I was one of that adoring throng. I waited over a year on the library hold, mostly due to COVID.

An excellent multipart series, called Wolf Hall after the title of the first book, but also including the material from the second, Bring Up the Bodies, was shown a few years ago on Masterpiece Theatre, and starred the incomparable Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, the main character. It also starred Damien Lewis, in impeccable sleazy-Damien mode, as Henry VIII, a casting which must have seemed counterintuitive to those who think Henry always looked like the Holbein portrait of him in his declining years. He was once a slim, active, domineering, charismatic stud.

Which is why the poor man was so baffled at his inability to father a legitimate male progeny, a problem which becomes even more acute in this book when his illegitimate son and ace-in-the-hole dies unexpectedly. In fact, it turns positively homicidal. I won’t tell you who else dies in this book, in case you don’t know English royal history that well and it’s a spoiler for you. (There are actually several people who die in this book, including two of Henry’s queens…