I may be a year late in saying so, but I think Mantel thoroughly deserves her 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. It is a terrific book.
It is an imagined account, based on fact, of the rise of Thomas Cromwell from poverty and obscurity to wealth and power in the court of Henry VIII of England between 1527and 1535, though the story actually begins in 1500 when Cromwell is about 15. The book outlines Cromwell’s work in achieving Henry’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the separation of England from Papal authority, with Henry becoming Supreme Head of the Church in England.
What is so compelling about this? There are a number of things. This is a fascinating period, when revolutionary changes are taking place in England. Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, brought clandestinely into the country, is raising questions about the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. ‘Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’, muses Cromwell. Old feudal relationships are giving way to mercantile capitalism; the world is now run ‘Not from castle walls, but from counting houses’. And administrative and legal changes are creating England as a nation state, ruled by the King through Parliament, rather than deriving legitimacy from the Pope. Cromwell is both a product and an architect of these changes. How could his life not be interesting?
Only in such times could a man like Cromwell rise to the top. ‘I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the history of this realm’, says Henry. But it takes a man with extraordinary capacities to seize this opportunity. Mantel’s Cromwell is ‘at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury’. He knows how to bully, threaten and cajole. He is said to resemble ‘one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes’; he worries he looks ‘like a murderer’. He is a loving husband and father to an extended family. And somehow, no one is quite sure how, he becomes necessary to the King.’”Damn it all, Cromwell,”’ says the Duke of Norfolk, ‘”why are you such a … person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”’ A fully rounded, likeable person is what Mantel has created.
Then there is her mastery of detail about everyday life – and death. What they wore, what they ate, the plagues they died of, the executions they witnessed; all this is done without any parade of scholarship, though with great authority.
The book is written in the present tense. Some critics don’t like this, but I think it adds immediacy to the story. Because the action is so closely tied to Cromwell, the ‘he’ is sometimes ambiguous, which can be slightly annoying. The language is modern. Can a commoner touch the King? Yes, to stop him falling in the mud. ‘That’s one question answered. In case of peril, you may pick him up. Fish him out. Whatever.’ But there is also awareness of the idiom of the time, as in ‘”The old king bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons”’. Mantel is a master of language.
Writing about real people brings its own challenges. Most readers will have at least a vague idea of what happened at this time, and further information is only a mouse click away. If you don’t know, there is the suspense of a story unfolding. If you do, there is a different kind of tension: that arising when the reader knows about future events of which the characters are necessarily unaware. I’m not sure whether knowing or not knowing is better. The title ‘Wolf Hall’ really only makes sense if you do know what the future is to bring. But never fear, Mantel is working on a sequel.
If you want to find out more about Hilary Mantel, click here. There are less sympathetic versions of Cromwell: try Robert Hutchinson’s Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister. If you can’t bear not knowing what happened, there are many sites that will tell you, but you could start here.
What Book to Read? 
Julia I thought it was very well done in audio, I sttraed reading it but couldn’t get into it in print, so opted for audio instead. I did love Cromwell’s dry little remarks on everyone, for instance on Mary that talking shrimp? LOL! His thoughts on More were good too some of the best lines in the book! I heard she’s writing a sequel which continues Cromwell’s story to the end.
[…] true I didn’t warm to this book as easily as I did to Wolf Hall (2009), the first in the trilogy. I think this was because I found the striving Cromwell of the […]
[…] true I didn’t warm to this book as easily as I did to Wolf Hall (2009), the first in the trilogy. I think this was because I found the striving Cromwell of the […]
[…] book, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which won it in 2009. I loved Wolf Hall, but for some reason, I have found Bring UP The Bodies much harder to get into. Is it […]
I listened to Wolf Hall on audio last year and liked it, but I wasn’t bolewd over by it like you are. How do you like the whole he pronoun thing regarding Cromwell, I remember many people found it bothersome. LOL! His name is never actually used when referring to him in the third person, it’s always he.
I came, I read this article, I conquered.
This is an excellent review. It’s hard to do justice to Wolf Hall, ranging as it does from the broad scope of the period to the imagined details of personal life, and death. It’s only in the context of the big struggles – of state, of religion, of trade and business – to effect change or to reinforce tradition, that the smaller scale of Cromwell’s personal life can be appreciated. However that is a very big canvas. I agree that the details of daily life were very skilfully drawn; the sounds of servants, the smells from the kitchens – and the drains – and the sights along the narrow streets or the dark wharves evoked warmth on the one hand, fear on the other, but always sympathy and engagement. Cromwell did come through as a real person, with believable abilities that explain his improbable rise from a harsh and impoverished boyhood to the king’s chief counsellor.
I do wonder about the imagined life and the documented one, especially in relation to Cromwell’s critical thinking about religion. To portray him as sympathetic to the Tyndale Bible does create an even more credible antagonist to the the authority of Rome over England, more of a man of conviction than convenience, but was he? I’d better follow a few of those links to satisfy my curiosity on that one.
I\’m one of the readers who loved Wolf Hall on audio; I wrote about how much fun it was to drive and lietsn to it during February and March last year. No matter how dismal I felt in the endless, gray Ohio winter, something worse was always happening in Wolf Hall and they were bouncing back from it those who lived through it, anyway.