Bring Up the Bodies.

Hilary Mantel was the first author to win the Booker Prize for two novels in the same series, and the first woman to win the award twice, taking the 2009 honor for Wolf Hall, then winning again three years later for the sequel Bring Up the Bodies. (The third book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is due out in March.) While Wolf Hall was long and a bit arduous to read, it was full of plot and intrigue, and ultimately rewarded the effort required to get through it. Bring Up the Bodies, however, is just as tough to get through, without the plot rewards, with really just one thread through the book, and that one not a terribly compelling one.

Thomas Cromwell remains the protagonist, and Henry VIII is still the king, but now Anne Boleyn is the queen and Katherine, her predecessor, is in exile in the country. Henry still doesn’t have a male heir, however, and his patience grows thin just as his ardor grows for Jane Seymour, Medicine Woman. It falls to Cromwell, as always, to find a solution, but this one is far bloodier than the one he cooked up to help depose Katherine from the throne. Anne was eventually accused of adultery, including sleeping with her own brother, and beheaded, although the charges are poorly substantiated in historians’ view and in Mantel’s retelling, where it seems clear that she thinks it was all cooked up by Cromwell at the king’s behest.

The fundamental problem with Bring Up the Bodies is that that is the entire plot. There’s the same backbiting from the first novel, but the development of additional characters is gone. Cromwell’s son Gregory and ward Rafe Sadler are barely here. The members of the royal retinue are all replacement level, simpering and obsequious with one face, vindictive and Machiavellian with the other. Anne’s character is also not interesting enough to work as the primary antagonist; she’s very one-dimensional, less flirtatious than in Wolf Hall and more plotting and desperate as she realizes her place is slipping. She, too, fails to provide Henry with an heir – maybe his boys can’t swim? – and miscarries more than once in the course of this novel, which would explain the deterioration of her character but also makes her far less interesting in the retelling. Cromwell himself is also less three-dimensional here now that he’s widowed and his daughters are gone, all dead of the “sweating sickness” that affected London in the 1400s and 1500s.

Mantel’s habit of referring to Cromwell merely as “he,” only clarifying that she means him when it would be impossible to discern to whom “he” referred, grated on me in Wolf Hall and here it’s just exhausting. There are still lots of men running around, many of them with similar enough names and variable jobs, so that it’s not easy to keep them straight; I know Mantel didn’t make up the names, but a Cranmer and a Cromwell who is sometimes called “Cremuel” by the Francophone characters, plus a bunch of Henrys and Harrys and Thomases, is a mental burden not justified by the story around them all.

This won the Booker Prize because, in the words of the chairman of that year’s judging panel, Mantel “has rewritten the rules of historical fiction.” That may be true – it seems like Mantel works to stay within what we do know of the era and its personalities, creating a story with plausible details and a compromise in the dialogue that makes it readable – but it doesn’t make the story gripping, and I’m not clear on whether she rewrote those rules of historical fiction in this book or the first time she won the prize.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser, his first novel in six years.