The Steve Tiberius Donoghue Book Club: Bring Up the Bodies, Part 3!

I've read the next 100 pages of Bring Up the Bodies, so it's once again time to check in with Steve Donoghue's commentary.  (For Steve's commentary on part 1 see HERE, for part 2 see HERE.)

As always, Steve is very entertaining.  He gets so animated when discussing these books, that I imagine these videos would be a lot of fun to watch even if you haven't yet read this book.  (Go ahead, give it a watch! It's pretty entertaining, isn't it?)

As Steve mentions in the video, we are now in the part of the book where Cromwell is beginning to round up the men who will be accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn, and killed with her.  

This is something I remember from the TV show The Tudors--that it was not only Anne Boleyn who was killed, but a whole group of men with her, including her brother George Boleyn.  

But, as its been 10 years now since I saw that TV show, I don't really remember any of the other men except for George Boleyn.  So recently I've been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia to look up their fates.

Now, I'm no expert, but certainly the impression I get from Wikipedia is the same as what Steve says in this video--that Cromwell was a thug who invented the charges, tortured Mark Smeaton into confession (W), and rigged the jury (W) to ensure death sentences.

So, based on my Wikipedia knowledge, I like Steve, was reading this book, wondering to myself, "How is Hilary Mantel going to manage to make Cromwell the good guy in this?"

I am reminded of the NHK Historical Drama: Shinsengumi! that I watched years ago.  As I wrote in my review:

...,since I had read Romulus Hillsborough’s book, and knew what was coming, I knew that as the series progressed the innocent boy scouts portrayed in the Shinsengumi were going to have factional infighting, start killing each other in some cases, and in other cases force each other to commit seppuku.　It kept me wondering. “How are they going to portray this or that incident without ruining the image of the pure hearted characters they’ve been showing so far?”

To their credit, the TV series did not omit any of the bloodier or uglier incidents in the Shinsengumi history, but they always found an interesting way of interpreting these incidents to show that the Shinsengumi was never at fault itself,

I find Mantel's historical fiction interesting for the same reason.  As Steve says elsewhere (in another video of his I once saw), she's playing with the historical record.  She knows the real-life Cromwell was most likely a thug, but, as Wikipedia says, we don't have any hard evidence of how Mark Smeaton was actually tortured, and their are conflicting stories.  So it allows Mantel to invent a different narrative which fits in with the historical facts just enough so that she can say it's a possible alternative.  

It's all part of the fun of historical fiction.  As you're reading the book, you wonder, "How is she possibly going to make Cromwell the good guy here?"  And then when you see the narrative that she makes, you think, "Ah, very clever."

...even though, it does mean you are juggling two narratives in your head simultaneously.  One narrative is the real historical record, in which poor Mark Smeaton and the others were cruelly killed to satisfy Cromwell's ambition.  And the other narrative is the world of the novel in which Cromwell is just doing his duty.  I find my mind jumping back and forth between the two realities often as I read through Mantell's narrative, and based on Steve's commentary, it sounds like his reading experience is the same.

* One nitpick: Steve at one point says that the "Richard" in the scene with Mark Smeaton is Richard Riche.  But he's getting his Richards mixed up.  It's actually Richard Cromwell (Thomas Cromwell's nephew).