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gazing at length on the Holbein portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell that are hanging on its walls. But none of this, however instructive, made up for my feeling of loss, of having been ejected from a world that I could no longer inhabit because the final doors had now closed on me.
    One would think that a sequel would solve this problem, and so it was with particular eagerness that I picked up the next volume in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. Bring Up the Bodies is a well-told tale, worth reading for its own merits, but it is not as good as Wolf Hall . This should not have surprised me. Time after time, having finished the marvelous first novel in a series—Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger , Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows , L. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone , Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune , Edward St. Aubyn’s Never Mind , and many others, too numerous to list—I have rushed to the second and third volumes to gobble up more about the characters, only to find myself disappointed. This is never a learning experience: you cannot refrain from taking the next step, any more than you can refrain from watching the episode that comes after a cliffhanger on TV. But though your curiosity may be satisfied, your much-raised expectations of pleasure will not be. With a handful of exceptions (Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels and Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series come to mind), the sequels to a great first novel are bound to be distinctly inferior. The characters have grown up, or reformed, or otherwise lost their edge. The tale-telling has become dutiful, perhaps even a bit weary.
    To these standard problems, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies adds a few of its own. The author is stuck with the fact that the later career of Thomas Cromwell is more sordid and less engaging than his early struggles. Also, since the story of Anne Boleyn is already more familiar to us than the rest of the Henry the Eighth tale, Mantel has to cope with the reader’s own expectations about the plot. And the unusual style she invented to transmit both historical distance and narrative intimacy (in particular, the use of an undesignated “he” to refer to Cromwell) has by now, perhaps, begun to strike us as slightly mechanical. None of this means that the novel is actively bad; I don’t think Mantel is capable of writing a bad novel. But it almost makes me wish—against my own readerly interests—that she had chosen to end her story in midstream, leaving me with that terrific, inconsolable hunger.
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    One can derive this sense of longing from narrative artworks that are not literature. I felt something very much like it after I finished watching the television series The Wire . I also felt it at the end of The Best of Youth , the six-hour Italian movie that first showed on Italian television. Very few standard-length movies are capable of creating this sensation of loss; it requires the Wagnerian length and the Dickensian intimacy of television, I think. And most television is not good enough to accomplish it. But when it does happen, as in these two cases, you get something that has a kind of literary profundity.
    Here, I suppose, is where the definition of “literature” gets fuzzy. You could insist that it must depend on the written word. But even television shows—that is, good television shows—begin as scripts. If those scripts need full performance to bring them to life, well, so do most plays; and since we are willing to count drama as literature, why not television as well? Besides, it may be that the written word is not as essential as we think. Consider Homer, who had no written text at all, but simply sang his verses to those assembled around him, relying on them to memorize and transmit the poems. Or what about fairy tales? They may have been gathered together by the Brothers Grimm and the like, but they existed in orally disseminated form long before that. At what point in their