Like with any great tragedy, we know the end. Henry VIII will turn on his beloved advisor, Thomas Cromwell, and have him beheaded. But the gory spectacles of history are not what preoccupy Hilary Mantel, whose acclaimed historical trilogy has finally reached its conclusion. The Mirror & the Light comes eight years after Bring Up the Bodies, the previous book in the double-Booker-winning series. The finesse and complexity of the last book, however, make it well worth the wait. It is not a novel weighed down by historical detail, precisely researched as it is. Rather, it is a plunge into the darkest, most tender corners of Cromwell’s mind.

“Now we live in an age of coercion, where the king’s will is an instrument reshaped each morning,” Cromwell says early on, a prescient thought, for history has told us what he does not know yet. Having helped Henry annul his second marriage to Anne Boleyn, and having had her beheaded on the charge of adultery, Cromwell still cannot rest on his laurels. Nor can he rejoice in having pried the Church of England from the grip of papal jurisdiction. At the end of the day, he is answerable to a fickle tyrant, his own Frankenstein. The book, then, is not simply about his destruction, but also about what he has created.

Nations churn with the bad decisions of men, and Cromwell knows this truth well. It is he who tries to quash rebellions and foreign invasion, while also finding wives appropriate for both Henry’s lust and England’s future. An astute observer of history, Cromwell wonders, “Can you make a new England?” He then realises that the most you can do is “write a new story”. This wisdom eludes Henry, and that is why it is Cromwell who emerges as the true architect of the nation, one whose decisions reverberate through England even today.

But the fact is that Cromwell is not the king. He is a man of humble origins who worked his way to privilege. And so, he is also a man of many enemies. He bides his time as men whom he trusted plot to pull him down. It is too late by the time Henry regrets the execution. It takes 800 pages for Mantel to bring us the death we are expecting and yet she manages to captivate. But unlike the earlier two books, this one is not driven by plot. It is an interior slow-burn with a narrative voice that moves between third and second person. These routine shifts of gaze are masterful. They reveal a character who is both vile and compassionate, misogynist and yet more perceptive of women than his peers. Henry says, “Women are the beginning of all mistakes”, but Cromwell knows, “If she dies, [a woman] will be lamented and forgottenIf she lives, she must hide her wounds.” Despite the blood on Cromwell’s hands, Mantel makes us feel for him deeply, briefly, we might believe he was the lesser evil of evil men.