Good as Hell: The intoxicating gloom of Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction

THE TUDOR ROSE ON THE JACKET OF THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT—the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which I’ve looked forward to reading for five long years—has watched me like a cyclops eye since the novel’s publication in March. “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away,” Mantel starts, putting us at the scene of Anne Boleyn’s execution and installing us, with the closest of third-person narrations, in Cromwell’s head—which will eventually also be sliced off—to witness his enthralling detachment up close. By day, I think of the two-tone flower’s ring of white petals on Mantel’s novel more like a light at the end of the tunnel than a menace—the symbol of a future when reading will no longer seem impossible. In hellish times, maybe an image of heaven is too absurd, even sarcastic, a snow globe floating past you in a flood of lava.