Wolf Hall: A Novel Review
In her latest novel, Mantel has captured the spirit of the rebellion against the Church and a pope who will not bow to pressure and annul the marriage of Henry VII and Katherine of Aragon. It is only by this means that Henry can legally wed Anne Boleyn, the woman in whom he has invested his hopes of son and heir. Once enjoined, the battled is waged for years, one of the most significant players the base-born Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer of great talent, with the wit to appreciate the nature of this clash of wills. Henry will have his way: it is only a matter of when and at what cost. As the battle lines are drawn, Cromwell provides the perspective of a self-made man, trained in politics through his years in service to Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York. Although Wolsey will eventually fall before the weight of Henry's demands, Cromwell proves an avid student in the matter of politics and power, the dangers of ambition. He is quietly outraged by the cruelty of those who execute the details of Wolsey's fall from grace. A master of words and reason, Cromwell earns his reputation honestly, in thrall to no belief save the constructs of the law.
The cast of characters and political events are impressive, from the petulant Henry to the scheming Boleyn's, courtiers vying for favor in Henry's court, the stubborn and righteous nature of Thomas More, pursuer of heretics, the never-ending machinations on behalf of Katherine of Aragon's interests. Certainly the interpretation of God's will plays a major part in men's arguments regarding the resolution of Henry's "Great Matter". While the king impatiently waits for word from Rome, More lays siege to the king's arguments, counting all of Christendom and the saints on his side. Meanwhile, Cromwell guides the affairs of a king he has grown to love, befriending the clever Anne Boleyn, who burns with the desire to be Henry's queen. While reason and logic prevail- thanks to Cromwell's efforts- the Church endures, time the pope's greatest weapon.
Mantel's portrayal of Thomas Cromwell is nothing short of brilliant, his worldview shaped by experience and reason, balancing the strengths and limitations of friend and foe, whether Anne Boleyn, lifelong adversary Bishop Gardiner, the combative prelate Thomas More, who tortures both heretics and himself, relishing pain for God's sake, even the bitter Jane Rochford, jealous wife of Anne's brother, George, "lonely and breeding a savage heart". Cromwell is intimate with power, knowledgeable about finance, commerce and governance, feared and hated by many, but loved by those he has brought into his home. Cromwell's fate is yet unknown at the end of this superb novel, which culminates with the beheading of Thomas More. This tumultuous period of king vs. church is viewed through the eyes of a base-born man, the history of England forever changed by a willful Tudor king's determination to wrest his future from the domination of the Vatican. Luan Gaines/2010.
Wolf Hall: A Novel Overview
WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII. . . . Magnificent." (The Boston Globe).
Hilary Mantel is the author of nine previous novels, including A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In Mantel's 16th century monarchy, individuals must fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
"It is a famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger: Thomas Cromwell in his finery, about 1534, looking formidable and clutching a piece of paper while he sits at a desk that holds the implements he used to write Henry VIII’s correspondence and draft Henry VIII’s laws. In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s arch, elegant, richly detailed biographical novel centered on Cromwell, she has used Holbein’s delivery of the portrait as the basis for a dagger-sharp moment of truth . . . It is Ms. Mantel’s velvet-gloved delivery of such devastating observations, her book’s broad historical sweep and her counterintuitive choice to make Cromwell its primary focus that have helped make Wolf Hall a widely favored contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize . . . Her book’s main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words . . . Ms. Mantel also has improbable success in reinventing Anne Boleyn. Or at least she succeeds in newly underscoring Anne’s debt to Niccolo, as this book’s characters refer to Machiavelli. With the king’s friends, Cromwell notices: 'Anne is brittle in their company, and as ruthless with their compliments as a housewife snapping the necks of larks for the table. If her precise smile fades for a moment, they all lean forward, anxious to know how to please her. A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.' And when Anne bears a daughter who can seemingly never inherit the throne (though she will of course grow up to be Queen Elizabeth I), Ms. Mantel provides a prime example of acerbic flair. The baby is described as 'an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature.' Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel’s slyly malicious turns of phrase would count for little more than banter if they could not succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters to talking. But she is able to place Cromwell on plausibly familiar terms with royalty and on a fair moral footing with More, that paragon of self-sacrifice . . . Wolf Hall is far too tricky a book to let Cromwell’s pronouncement be taken at face value. He is, after all, the king’s wily advocate. And he is never without an agenda. But this much is certain: More’s downfall has been assured by the time Cromwell finishes with him. Cromwell’s troubles, which will be no less lethal, are barely stirring when Wolf Hall ends. It is to be hoped that Ms. Mantel makes Cromwell’s endgame part of her future."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all . . . This is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears.”—Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books
“Whether we accept Ms Mantel’s reading of history or not, her characters have a lifeblood of their own . . . a Shakespearean vigour. Stylistically, her fly-on-the-wall approach is achieved through the present tense, of which she is a master. Her prose is muscular, avoiding cod Tudor dialogue and going for direct modern English. The result is Ms Mantel’s best novel yet.”—The Economist
“A novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry’s formidable advisor, Thomas Cromwell. It’s no wonder that her masterful book just won this year’s Booker Prize . . . [Mantel’s prose is] extraordinarily flexible, subtle, and shrewd.”—Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
"Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator's day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society—not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia . . . Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable."—Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review
“[Mantel’s] interest is in the question of good and evil as it applies to people who wield great power. That means anguish, exultation, deals, spies, decapitations, and fabulous clothes . . . She always goes for color, richness, music. She has read Shakespeare closely. One also hears the accents of the young James Joyce.”—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
“Mantel’s abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing. She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of England.”—Ross King, Los Angeles Times
“Instead of bringing the past to us, [Mantel's] writing, brilliant and black, launches us disconcertingly into the past. We are space-time travelers landed in an alien world . . . history is a feast whose various and vital excitements and intrigues make the book a long and complex pleasure.”—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
“Historical fiction at its finest, Wolf Hall captures the character of a nation and its people. It exemplifies something that has lately seemed as mythical as those serpent princesses: the great English novel.”—Bloomberg News
"[Mantel] wades into the dark currents of 16th century English politics to sculpt a drama and a protagonist with a surprisingly contemporary feel . . . Wolf Hall is sometimes an ambitious read. But it is a rewarding one as well.”—Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor
“The story of Cromwell’s rise shimmers in Ms. Mantel’s spry intelligent prose . . . [Mantel] leaches out the bones of the story as it is traditionally known, and presents to us a phantasmagoric extravaganza of the characters’ plans and ploys, toils and tactics.”—Washington Times
“There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. Set during Henry VIII’s tumultuous, oft-covered reign, this epic novel . . . proves just how inspired a fresh take can be. [Mantel] is an author as audacious as Anne [Boleyn] herself, imagining private conversations between public figures and making it read as if she had a glass to the wall.”—People Magazine
“Fans of historical fiction—or great writing—should howl with delight.”—USA Today
“This masterwork is full of gems for the careful reader. The recurring deta...
Wolf Hall: A Novel Specifications
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: No character in the canon has been writ larger than Henry VIII, but that didn't stop Hilary Mantel. She strides through centuries, past acres of novels, histories, biographies, and plays--even past Henry himself--confident in the knowledge that to recast history's most mercurial sovereign, it's not the King she needs to see, but one of the King's most mysterious agents. Enter Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man and remarkable polymath who ascends to the King's right hand. Rigorously pragmatic and forward-thinking, Cromwell has little interest in what motivates his Majesty, and although he makes way for Henry's marriage to the infamous Anne Boleyn, it's the future of a free England that he honors above all else and hopes to secure. Mantel plots with a sleight of hand, making full use of her masterful grasp on the facts without weighing down her prose. The opening cast of characters and family trees may give initial pause to some readers, but persevere: the witty, whip-smart lines volleying the action forward may convince you a short stay in the Tower of London might not be so bad... provided you could bring a copy of Wolf Hall along. --Anne Bartholomew
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Customer Reviews
A decent read for fans of Tudor history - P. J. Owen - Atlanta GA USA
Wolf Hall is a fictional take on the rise and corruption of Thomas Cromwell, a councilor of Henry VIII and the person largely responsible for many of the legislations separating England from the Catholic Church. As someone with a keen interest in British history, especially the Tudor period, I was excited about reading this book, but came out of the experience somewhat disappointed.
The book is written from Cromwell's POV and focuses on a particularly sticky point in the history of England, when Henry VIII badly wanted and England badly needed a male heir to assure the line of succession. Having failed to provide, Henry's first wife Katherine is pushed aside for Anne Boleyn. But in the 16th century even the King of England could not openly defy the Catholic Church. Most of the book follows this plot, as allegiances shift and lives are destroyed for the King's pleasure.
But anyone who has read the history knows it was a wide ranging and chaotic time, and so is this novel. It is spread thin and confusing. So hard is it to keep up with the cast of characters in fact, Mantel felt the need to list them at the beginning and give us two royal family trees just to keep things straight. Yet, as helpful as these tools are, Mantel still seems to go to great lengths to confuse us by utilizing the personal pronoun `he' in a unique way (though we soon learn that unless the `he' in question is obviously someone else, it is always Cromwell) and by using the various names of the nobility, i.e. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the duke, etc. all to mean the same person.
The characterizations are vividly drawn, which is impressive given the vast array of players. But we care little for them. The major players are all wrapped up in their own personal quests for power. Some are overdone, like Thomas More, who comes off like a villain in a Dicken's novel. There are moments when we care a little for Cromwell. As the POV character, we see more of his emotions, and scenes when he recalls his wife and children are effective. And there are some minor characters, caught up and crushed in the wheels of history, who rend our hearts a little. But these moments are spread out over the wide landscape of the book, and never catch for long.
So it is that while Wolf Hall is an expertly written, ambitious work, it fell short for me. Many times I had to force myself to read on. My momentum was not just stopped by confusing character attributions and unsympathetic characters though. Many scenes, especially early on, don't move, are devoid of tension. Since the reader will likely know the outcome of the plot, it is especially important in historical novels that a good tension is kept throughout to keep the reader engaged. I felt Mantel failed in this regard. Having to force your way through a good majority of a 500+ page book is not a pleasant reading experience. Things picked up a bit from about page 300 or so, but by then my opinion had been formed.
Thus, I would say that if you're interested in British history, give it a shot. It's well-written enough that you could enjoy good chunks of it. But if you don't care about the history, then skip it. I don't think it would be engaging enough for anyone without an interest in the subject.
Wolf Hall - L. T. Barr - PA
It takes some getting used to the author's style, so the characters can get muddled at times. But this is a fascinating portrait of Cromwell and other major players in the drama surrounding Henry VIII. While this is clearly the author's fictionalized interpretation of the principal characters, her rendering of the era is hauntingly real. A great read!
A real slog unless you are a devoted Tudor fan. - esauboeck - Pasadena, CA
Sorry, folks, I'm sure this was a rip-roaring read for those who like such things, but the first 50 pages were such a violent, boring slog that I just couldn't get going. And I'm just not the one to read any book that has to have a many-paged list of characters to keep everyone straight. I understand from my Book Club that this was quite exciting once it got going, but not for me. Yes, I know it won the Booker Prize.
Wolf Hall - Melissa A. Palmer -
A good book of historical fiction, this book focuses on Thomas Cromwell, Henry's secretary. Cromwell was an interesting part of the TV series "The Tudors", so this book interested me. That whole lifestyle is interesting to me--I would not have lasted long during those days! The chess game of matchmaking and power getting is amazing to read about to me. Good writing style, it was similar to that of Phillipa Gregory, which is a good thing to me. This was the first book I bought for my Kindle :-)
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