There’s something incredibly impressive and incredibly satisfying about a well-done trilogy. Even the most skilled of authors run the risk of either fading at the end, or proving unable to contain themselves, and seeing the work either feel incomplete or spill over even more volumes.
Hilary Mantel nails the landing with The Mirror and the Light (2020), completing the fictionalized story of Thomas Cromwell, begun with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Wolf Hall predated Reading Well, and I decided not to write about Bring Up the Bodies for some reason. Probably because it’s a challenge to imagine what I have to add to the fairly exhaustive commentary on these books. If you are likely to enjoy them, you probably already know about them and have read them.
I thoroughly enjoyed the trilogy, for two primary reasons. First, Cromwell has been so villainized over time, the challenge of making him a sympathetic character seemed almost insurmountable, and it was a pleasure riding along with Mantel as she successfully did so. Second, Mantel can freaking write, and when she applies her talent to the evocation of a historical moment both directly accessible to contemporary readers (folks were folks, technology was comprehensible, things tasted and smelled much as they do now, albeit in different proportions) and totally foreign to them (the specific conception of the deific nature of royalty), the results sparkle.
If historical fiction centered on providing a deep understanding of a single, fascinating figure is at all intriguing, this is as good as the genre gets.