While the middle-classes may be reading Fifty Shades of Grey in private, in public they are devouring Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's sequel to the much-read Wolf Hall. Mantel is engaged in a trilogy documenting the rise and subsequent fall of Thomas Cromwell, secretary (and schemer, and fixer) to Henry VIII through his disastrous marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn.
Despite its gripping story and virtuoso narrative style - a kind of intimate third person, with its protagonist almost invariably referred to as "he" rather than "Cromwell" - Mantel's portrayal has been criticised for failing to get under Cromwell's skin. We learn that Cromwell is willing to manipulate and intimidate on Henry's behalf, but not much about why. Affection for Henry? Loyalty? Greed? Lust for power? Mantel doesn't give us much of a clue.
I enjoyed both books, but I thought there was a deeper flaw, one which, oddly enough, came to mind while I was watching the opening Prom on Friday. It was an all English programme of very mixed quality - on the plus side Cockaigne and Tippett's quite wonderful Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles, and on the minus an opener by Mark Turnage which somehow managed to be boring even before its three minutes were up, Delius's Sea Drift,inflating a very average poem by Walt Whitman into a turgid half-hour for baritone, chorus and orchestra, and last - and worst - of all Elgar's quite staggeringly bad Coronation Ode, a monumental piece of jingoistic sucking-up written for the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902.
If those who have experienced the remoter corners of Elgar's work thought nothing could top (or do I mean bottom?) the execrable poem the Worcester wizard set in The Music Makers (stand up and hang your head Arthur O'Shaughnessy), the poet A.C.Benson had prepared a nasty surprise for them in the Coronation Ode.
"Crown the King with Life!", the opening number begins. "Through our thankful state / Let the cries of hate / Die in joy away / Cease ye sounds of strife! / Lord of Life, we pray, Crown the King with Life!" And so rumty-tumty on for a further six stanzas. The second movement, inserted when poet and composer realised they had forgotten to mention the new Queen Alexandra, praises "True Queen of British homes and hearts / Of guileless faith and sterling worth / We yield you ere today departs / The proudest, purest crown on earth!"
My wife, groaning into her knitting by now, said, "Just you wait, there'll be a bit about smiting Johnny Foreigner in a minute". And so there was. "Britain", demanded an aggressive-looking baritone, "ask of thyself, and see that they sons be strong / Strong to arise and go / See that thy sons be strong / See that thy navies speed, to the sound of the battle song / Then, when the winds are up, and the shuddering bulwarks reel / Smite the mountainous wave and scatter the flying foam / Big with the battle-thunder that echoeth loud and long."
"See that thy squadrons haste", he burbled, eyeing the Arena sternly, "when loos'd are the hounds of hell / Then shall the eye flash fire / and the valourous heart grow light".
Now bad words do not necessarily make bad music - I went to see Opera North's Valkyrie on Saturday, and Wagner triumphantly transcends the daft story - but Elgar padded this flannel with music in his Imperial manner, which gave the piece an air dated, sycophantic, banal and trite where not downright offensive.
Of these "dated" is perhaps the least important defect, but "dated" brings me roundly back to Hilary Mantel.
Elgar's Ode, written only a decade before the First World War, offers a view of monarchy, of empire and of war which induces gasps in the modern listener, so utterly alien is its world-view. In very short order the application of industrial methods to the battlefield made not so much "the valourous heart grow light" as scatter it to a bloody pulp on the fields of Flanders; as to Empire - it was gone within fifty years, regretted by few of the people that had to put up with it; and the monarchy is tolerated by Britons because its present incumbent has done the job with a dignity and tact that her successors will struggle to repeat. What seemed to two intelligent minds a little more than a century ago to be the natural order of things has been blown apart in a matter of a few decades.
If our outlook can change so profoundly in such a short period, what chance does Hilary Mantel have of making us see authentically through the eyes of a Royal Courtier at over four-hundred years' distance?
For me Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies make the fatal mistake of assuming that people in the 16th century behaved like we do, minus the electrical gadgets. But a society which thinks it legitimate to hang, draw, quarter and eviscerate its transgressors, whilst at the same time offering itself as pious and devotional, is not a society like ours. Moreover, its willingness to do such things must have manifested itself in other less bloody aspects. To work out what this must have been like would require authorship (and scholarship) of a very high order, producing a result that would astonish the modern reader. Actually these two novels conjure up a world that is implausibly like our own; much more like it even than Elgar and Benson's alien planet only a hundred years ago. Mantel is a very good writer, but on this score I think she has failed.
I still prefer her failure to Elgar's, mind.
