Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBCīut the dead are not absent.

‘We walk with him towards an outcome that we know but he does not’ … Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall. Right? The magnitude of the question checks him, like a hand on his arm. The question of whether Anne and the men executed for adultery with her received justice is one that haunts many of the characters in the novel, not least the king and Cromwell himself. Henry repeats the phrase, as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light. The mirror and the light of other kings.” It’s one of many references to both mirrors and light stitched subtly throughout the book, though the title comes directly from a line Cromwell offers Henry: It is only later in the book that we learn the words on the blade: Speculum justiciae, ora pro nobis. Cromwell is much taken with this sword: Toledo steel, incised with the words of a prayer. It’s been eight years since the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, for which Mantel won a second Booker prize, but we find Cromwell exactly where we left him, in May 1536, at the moment the French executioner has struck off Anne Boleyn’s head with his sword. This effect is particularly noticeable in The Mirror and the Light, the long-awaited third instalment of her trilogy about the blacksmith’s son from Putney who became Henry VIII’s right-hand man and the architect of much Tudor policy that reverberates down to the present. “St Augustine says the dead are invisible, they are not absent.” Mantel opened her first lecture with this quotation, and her historical novels are such towering achievements partly because she appears to inhabit the thoughts and sensory experience of her characters so fully – not so much as if she is channelling Thomas Cromwell, but as if she, disembodied, has projected herself back into his mind and drawn the reader with her as if we are, in effect, ghosts at his shoulder, seeing through his eyes. Ghosts have peopled her fiction from her first novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, and her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, made clear how permeable the boundary between the living and the dead can seem. She replied emphatically: “Yes,” almost before he had finished the question. W hen Hilary Mantel gave her BBC Reith lectures in 2017 on the subject of historical fiction, she was asked by one audience member if she was really writing ghost stories.

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel