Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Published 2012 · 432 pages · 140,685 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is Bring Up the Bodies to read?

Bring Up the Bodies scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Mantel draws on Tudor-era legal and court vocabulary — privy chamber, chantry chapel, pursuivant, principality administration — alongside period idioms and Latin ecclesiastical terms. Most unfamiliar words are legible from context, placing the book above contemporary literary fiction but well below specialist difficulty. Readers encounter a handful of archaic terms per chapter rather than per page.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
Sentences run long and recursive, folding subordinate observations inside observations: 'He is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower gardens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct.' The accumulation creates a Proustian texture without the full suspension of Jamesian hypotaxis. The present-tense, second-person 'he' construction adds a layer of syntactic unusualness throughout.
Abstraction: 52 out of 100
The novel is grounded in concrete Tudor daily life — feasts, letters, falcon flights, legal briefs — but Cromwell's interiority is rendered obliquely, requiring readers to reconstruct motive and moral stance from the surface of events. Ideas about power, loyalty, and complicity emerge through action rather than philosophical digression. Closer to Remains of the Day's emotional abstraction beneath surface than to Brothers Karamazov's overt philosophical debates.
Information density: 68 out of 100
Mantel tracks dozens of named courtiers, diplomatic threads, property disputes, and royal moods simultaneously. The opening hundred pages alone introduce Norris, Brereton, Weston, Wyatt, Rochford, the Seymours, and multiple ambassadors — each with distinct political allegiances that bear on the plot. Historical context (the break with Rome, Katherine's death, the succession question) is embedded in the texture without being explained. Comparable to the multi-plotline density of War and Peace but in a more compressed form.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
Mantel never tells us directly what Cromwell thinks or intends. His decision to fabricate evidence against Anne Boleyn's supposed lovers is conveyed through a series of noticing — he observes that Norris controls the king's secret funds, registers that Brereton is resistant to his oversight — without the novel ever stating that he is building a case from convenience rather than evidence. Readers must infer his culpability from what he chooses to see. Comparable to Nick Carraway's bias in Gatsby but operating at a graver moral pitch.
Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
The opening falcon sequence — hawks named Grace and Anne Cromwell, dead women 'transmigrated' into birds that pity no one and answer to no one — sets a persistent symbolic register. Flesh, bodies, and dismemberment recur as images throughout the plot to prosecute Anne. The title itself operates on multiple levels: the legal call to produce the accused, the physical condemned bodies, and the bodies of Cromwell's dead wife and daughters who haunt his consciousness. The symbolism is carefully controlled rather than overwhelming.
Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
Mantel maintains steady ironic distance through the third-person 'he': we are close enough to Cromwell to understand his calculations, far enough to see him constructing the legal machinery of judicial murder. The novel sympathizes with his intelligence and wit while making the horror of his actions available to any reader paying attention. Lady Rochford, Norris, and Brereton are rendered with enough humanity that their condemnation registers as injustice even as Cromwell executes it with studied efficiency.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
The plot resolves completely — the historical outcome is known from the start, and the novel delivers Anne Boleyn's fall and the executions of her supposed lovers without ambiguity. But the moral resolution is deliberately withheld: Mantel never pronounces on Cromwell's guilt, never adjudicates between the cynical reading (he fabricated the evidence) and the more sympathetic one (he believed the king's mood and acted accordingly). The ending leaves readers to determine what they have witnessed.
Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
The novel is essentially linear, covering roughly six months of 1535–36 in chronological order. The second-person 'he' narration creates a layer of formal strangeness — readers must constantly verify which 'he' is acting — but no timeline fragmentation, no multiple POV shifts, and no metafictional apparatus. Simpler structurally than Wolf Hall, which required more orientation as the series opener.

How Bring Up the Bodies is regarded

Bring Up the Bodies holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

What Bring Up the Bodies asks you to hold together

Bring Up the Bodies sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. It peaks at Systematic (12), a constellation on pages 178–180. Read from the full text, all 286 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Bring Up the Bodies sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (286 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. About the map of stories.

Mode: High Mimetic
Henry killed his father's councillors. He killed the Duke of Buckingham. He destroyed the cardinal and harried him to his death, and struck the head off one of Europe's great scholars. Now he plans to kill his wife and her family and Norris who has been his closest friend. What makes you think it will be different with you, that are not the equal of any of these men?
Symbol: Formal
Her face has fallen; she does not yet know how thrifty the king can be, this most magnificent prince. Henry should have warned me, he thinks. Beneath Anne's initial you can still distinguish the 'K'.
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy v (tragedy v)
Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
He is never in error. It is only that other people commit errors on his behalf or deceive him with false information.

Where the story of Bring Up the Bodies takes place

  • The Tudor court, 1535-1536 (1535 to 1536), the main setting

Scenes in Bring Up the Bodies that Frye would name

63 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, passage 279
a sound like a whistle through a keyhole Anne's execution rendered obliquely — the book's strongest pathos, superseding the trial scene.
Hamartia, passage 177
Yes, she said, and repent your sins there, because you look for dead men's shoes, if aught came to the king but good, you would look to have me. Anne's reported remark to Norris — that he might have her if the king died — is the treasonous 'imagining' of the king's death that becomes the single most consequential misstep in the book.
Pathos, passage 208
she seems to dissolve and slip from their grasp Anne's arrest completes at the Tower steps; the single strongest pathos candidate before the execution itself.
Displacement, passage 222
took him by the hand Henry mythologizes his own marriage as a fairy-tale forest-abduction, converting guilt into tragic victimhood.
Sparagmos, passage 230
turned the cardinal into a beast Norris forced to relive the Wolsey-fall masque — the clearest staged-sparagmos-as-motive in the book.
Pharmakos, passage 235
George Boleyn, right forepaw. The four accused men counted off like the dismembered quarters of a hunted animal — the clearest character-function evidence in the book for this term.

Books that share these scenes with Bring Up the Bodies

About the author

Hilary Mantel