Wednesday, September 20, 2023

The Steve Tiberius Donoghue Book Club: Bring Up the Bodies Concludes (plus: July's pick)!


And so we come to the last video in Steve's read-along of Bring Up the Bodies (see also Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).
A large part of this video consists of Steve reading out a longer passage from this book, and I'm really glad he did.  I had read this same passage myself, but I hadn't really thought that much of it when I first read it.  Hearing Steve read it, and comment on it, makes me realize how good that passage actually was.
And it was also just really entertaining  to listen to him read it aloud.  I've really been enjoying these videos.

The one thing I am confused about though: as Steve pointed out in his Part 3 commentary, in Hilary Mantel's version of history, Thomas Cromwell uncovers the infidelity rather than invents it.   So if this is something that Cromwell has accidentally uncovered, how is it also a revenge plot that he has carefully orchestrated?
I may be missing something (I'm probably missing something), but I was confused about this throughout the whole second half of the book.  Are these men guilty, or aren't they?  The narrator seemed to be implying they were guilty one moment, and simple victims of Cromwell's revenge the next moment.

 One nitpick--At the beginning of the video, Steve said it was a decades' long revenge plot.  It's not decades' long.  I believe Wolsey only died 6 years before Anne Boleyn.

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