Having Read Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies - 9-16-2014

  [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

One thing that comes from these posts being out of chronological order - these posts about books, particularly - is that information is omitted. With these posts about books, I notice I keep referring to the best novels of all time. When I in prison, deciding to take seriously my writing fiction, I created a reading list of books/writers; one source for this list was Entertainment Weekly's 100 Best Novels of All Time. When you see the phrase "best novels of all time", it is a reference to this list.

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I cannot call Bring Up The Bodies one of the hundred greatest novels of all time. I do say it is a grand novel and more than worth the time spent with it. My immersion into the twisty, murderous Englishness of Henry VIII's court is not a reaction to the ripe Russianness of The Brothers Karamazov.

I gave up on William Blake. While I like his poetry and his piety (however individualistic it was), I had enough of his mysticism. It was also a rather ugly paperback which was falling apart. Blake had no real chance against Mantel's style, which has a tempo, a phrasing, that compels, if not mesmerizes.

She writes her historical mood in the present tense. This gives an immediacy, a suspense, to an oft told tale: the death of Anne Boleyn. The novel opens with this paragraph:

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromewll hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sound she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh, and raffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, there are the sounds of recognition, initimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her brass is gore-streaked and flech clings to her claws.

 Part one; I, "Falcons"

Uh huh. Quite a bit of strangeness, eh?  Having read the novel, the opening seems quite appropriate as an opening - even if only for setting a tone, putting forward a metaphor. Great writing. Not sure why Entertainment Weekly put it down as one of the greatest novels of all time.

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