I first became aware of
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, while studying abroad in Oxford,
England. I remember walking into Blackwell’s bookshop, where stacks of the book
sat on tables near the entrance and display racks propped up copies throughout
the store. I remember looking at the book, but, thinking that it might be too
bland, I set it back down and never decided to procure a copy until over three
years later. By then, not only had Wolf
Hall won the Booker Prize for Fiction, but its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, had made history by winning its own Booker Prize.
In the interim between my first encounter with Wolf Hall on the shelves at Blackwell’s and my decision to finally
read the massive historical-fiction work, Ms. Mantel had become the first
female to win the Booker Prize twice, and the first writer to win the prize for
a book and its sequel.
I entered Wolf Hall
with great expectations – of what exactly, I’m not sure. I had been careful to
close my ears and eyes around any plot synopses I had stumbled upon, but now,
that the book was in my hands, I was tempted every moment to double-check every
fact that I had once crammed into my head about Henry VIII’s government and the
rise of the Church of England. The only thing that I knew about the book, upon
beginning my reading, was it was about the reign of Henry VIII. I was
perplexed, then to be greeted by a young man being severely beaten in the
courtyard of a Putney residence. Where were Henry and his court? Who was this
upstart? Who was Walter, the man dishing out the beating? I was hooked from the
outset, and slowly names I recognized began to emerge: Thomas Cromwell,
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (a man whose appearance immediately piqued my interest,
since we meet him as he sets out to found Cardinal College, later Christ Church
Oxford, where I would spend my study abroad experience in England), Thomas
More, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (father to the poet, Henry), and even a
young Thomas Wyatt eventually came to call. The novel abounded in Thomas’s, and
the writer, keen to make a note of this, even allows her protagonist, Cromwell,
to make a joke regarding the surfeit of Thomases in Tudor England. The cast of
characters is immense, and each character is referred to by at least two
appellations. The novel requires an attentive and loving reader, but it rewards
those who show it love. Reader’s rest assured; Ms. Mantel did her research, and
she created a masterpiece.
Ms. Mantel does take interpretive license with her
characters; if she did not give herself some leeway, then the book would have
been much smaller, less complex, and quite a bit less interesting. Characters
come across the page in vivid rendition, as they are perceived in the mind of
Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell’s machinations are fully on display, as he rises from
the ashes of Cardinal Wolsey’s fall. To Cromwell falls the task of delivering
to Henry a valid union with Anne Boleyn, his mistress of seven years. In
Henry’s reign, success is met with great reward and higher expectations. Court
intrigue is at the forefront; the rise of one man means the fall of another,
and Cromwell’s rise to power is paralleled with the painful descent of Thomas
More. The gallows are rarely empty; the fires rarely thirst for flesh; the
executioner’s ax does not fail to drip with fresh blood. And yet, rarely is an
execution described in its entirety. Eyes dip away at the drop of the feet or
the swing of the ax, and ears turn death before the screaming from the flames.
Nonetheless, the violence is real and visceral.
Only the novel’s constant politicking is more visceral
than its violence. The novel depends on the tensions at court. It focuses on
the dialogue, often presented indirectly, yet not without the flavor of
individual voices. As such, the novel is not for those who need a constant
stream of actions scenes, of blood, guts, and gore. The action is in the
dialogue, in the construction of a hierarchy, in tensions at court. From a
historical perspective, Mantel has chosen an exceptionably interesting period
about which to write. She has found a nation at crossroads, when conflicts of
religion rack the continent and have not left the British Isles untouched,
where a mercurial king seeks only one thing, a male heir upon whom he will hang
his crown to prevent the nation from falling back into Civil War after only two
reigns of relative peace. Mantel has found a nation just beginning to break
with the old ways, where Dukes and other nobleman hold sway and try to stave
off the advances of lesser men, those upstarts of low birth, the Wolseys and
the Cromwells.
As I have said, Ms. Mantel has created a masterpiece, a
tour de force that anyone interested in literature or the advancement of the
novel should read. The best thing about finishing Wolf Hall is the knowledge that the saga is not finished. Cromwell returns
in Bring Up the Bodies, a novel that
I greatly anticipate reading.
J.C.M.
13 December 2012
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