Almost 500 years after Thomas Cromwell was imprisoned in the Tower of London, the 1,000-year-old site was illuminated on Wednesday evening with an image marking the long-awaited release of the conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light.
On the other side of London, at Waterstones Piccadilly, hundreds of fans were queuing in the rain to be the first to get their hands on a copy of the novel – and to meet the author herself. Angela had already got stuck into her copy, and said she’d taken the day off work on Thursday to devote entirely to reading. “I want to go back to the 16th century.”
For Lucie, Wolf Hall is her favourite book, and she’s “been waiting for years for this one”. The first book in the series, tracing the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell, and the execution of Thomas More, was published in 2009, and went on to win the Booker prize. So did its sequel, 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell’s machinations lead to the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Late-night signings are the province of Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling – not so much the author of a 900-page historical novel. But the excitement among fans as Mantel walked regally to her signing was palpable, and Waterstones, which has events lined up all over the country, is expecting The Mirror & the Light to be its biggest book of the year. Pre-orders are already up by 50% on pre-orders for Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which sold almost 180,000 copies in its first four weeks on sale in the UK. The book has been heavily embargoed, with the 200 readers at the Waterstones event the first in the world to get a copy.
“People have been waiting for this book for a long time,” said Waterstones’ fiction buyer, Bea Carvalho, sitting – appropriately – in the Piccadilly store’s history section. “It’s the book that we have been asked about most over the last eight years.”
Fans waiting in line for the midnight launch of the highly embargoed final Harry Potter novel in 2007 were wondering which wizards JK Rowling might kill off, and which she might spare. In London on Wednesday, readers were clear about the fate awaiting Mantel’s hero Thomas Cromwell: the Tower then execution.
It did nothing to put them off. Stan, from Chicago, had bought a pile of four copies, for his two daughters and wife. “The whole family are fans,” he said. “My younger kids would have Harry Potter done in a day, and it might be the same for this. I’ll probably read it slower. I’m a history buff, so I know what happened in Tudor times, but she still finds new things to talk about, and to reveal about the character.”
“We have a reasonably clear idea of the path his life will take,” said Louise, who had travelled into London from Flitwick with her daughter Tash. “But I’m incredibly excited – I just don’t know she goes about keeping us sympathetic to someone who isn’t a good person, as we know from history. They’re so beautifully written.”
The Mirror & the Light was already longlisted for the Women’s prize even before it was published: all eyes will be on the choices of this year’s Booker judges. Asked if he thought Mantel had a chance of winning an unprecedented third Booker, her editor, Nicholas Pearson, refused to be drawn.
“But I will say that I do think it’s the crowning achievement of her career so far – and that’s saying something with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies behind you,” said Pearson, who has been Mantel’s editor since 2004. In September 2005 she sent him an email with an attachment containing the first handful of pages of Wolf Hall. “I thought, ‘This is something.’”
Mantel originally intended to write just one book but in 2008 Pearson got a phone call from the novelist “saying, ‘I’ve just got Thomas More’s head off and I think what I have is a book in itself,’” A few years later, he’d receive another call, “saying, ‘I’ve just got Anne Boleyn’s head off’ – and suddenly we were dealing with a trilogy.”
“Even though you know where the story’s going to end up, there is still an incredible thrill of watching a man proceeding week by week, month by month, trying to make the best decisions for himself and the country, and seeing how someone copes with that,” Pearson said. “Getting to the end of this story is really quite an emotional moment, when you read these final pages, and you have to leave that life behind that you’ve been living with in your head. It’s quite something.”