The replacement of Stella Rimington as chair of the Booker judges by Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, has had predictable consequences. Rimington's much derided "readability" has gone, and "literariness" has come storming back. I'm glad about this, because I thought Bring Up the Bodies, which has taken this year's prize, a much better novel than Julian Barnes' 2011 winner, The Sense of An Ending. I found Barnes' book very slight, crashing to the ground, like so many contemporary English novels, over some very basic plausibility hurdles.
I've written about both these books before, but am more convinced than ever that whilst Bring Up the Bodies is a tour de force, incorporating an ambiguous meshing of first and third person narrative styles that I have never encountered before, it tells us little about Thomas Cromwell, its protagonist. Cromwell is clearly a ruthless fixer, but lacks the venality expected of ruthless fixers, and lacks any other qualities which might have explained why someone we find so sympathetic should be willing to skewer his enemies in such a cold-eyed manner. There is an extent to which everyone is hard to pin down, and elusiveness is part of the human condition; but in Mantel's book Cromwell seems to me not so much elusive as hardly there at all.
As for her grasp of the period, all the detail is there, and it is never showy. But neither does she seem to have understood that those people 500 years ago were, as well as being the same as we are, also utterly different. Mantel has got the sameness, but that's all.
