Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
I finished this weighty tome yesterday and am off work with the flu today, so it's an ideal opportunity to offer a few final thoughts!
This was a really great read and I highly recommend it to all lovers of meaty historical fiction. As I said in my previous post, the book is so much more than a 'period drama': it's staggeringly well-written, clearly impeccably researched and does a fantastic job of letting the reader see the world through Cromwell's eyes. It probably works so well because it's written in the present tense so it reads as if events are unfolding in real time. However, my caveat about the confusion caused by the sheer number of characters (so many Thomases - Cromwell, More, Wolsey, Cranmer, Boleyn, Wyatt etc!) and the odd decision to over-use the pronoun 'he' instead of naming Cromwell, remain. The former is more my failing as a reader than Mantel's, I think, and the latter was possibly a stylistic decision made to further the feeling that the reader is inside Cromwell's head.
The novel builds to a sort of climax with the trial of More (and I loved the scenes in the Tower between Cromwell and More) but on the very last page the story just ends abruptly. So I'm glad to have discovered that Mantel intends to write a sequel, provisionally titled The Mirror And The Light. There's still a lot of story to tell - the fall of Anne Boleyn, the dissolution of the monasteries, the birth (at last) of King Henry's male heir and of course the fall of Cromwell himself. I look forward to reading it!
Next book - The Innocent by Ian McEwan.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
This is the Man For All Seasons
I'm now about two thirds of the way through Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and I think it's tremendous. A historical novel detailing the 'rise and rise' (as it says on the book's backpage blurb) of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's go-to man, it is so much more than a fictional recreation of events that anybody could have knocked off after ingesting a history book on the Tudors. Few books I've read can rival this one when it comes to detailing the inner thoughts, personality, memories, wants and desires of a human being. It really does read as if Mantel was somehow able to both go back in time and burrow into the brain of this fascinating man.
And that's what is particularly great about it. Because Thomas Cromwell has a bit of a bad rep and to explain why I'd better give a few historical details. Cromwell was a lawyer of humble origins who worked his way up from nothing to become the chief employee of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England, who almost rivalled the King in terms of power and prestige. Wolsey fell from the King's graces when he was unable to secure the Pope's OK for Henry to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn, which Henry believed was vital if he was ever to produce a male heir and secure the Tudor dynasty. Despite Wolsey's fall from power and subsequent death, Cromwell was able to finagle his way into the King's household and within 12 months became his chief councillor. In the early 16th century, for a man of no family name to leap to the top of the political pile, vaulting over the squabbling dukes and courtiers who had tumbled the Cardinal, was an incredible feat. Cromwell proved himself to the King by working out how to legally establish Henry as the only authority figure in England, thereby rendering the Pope's hold over his first marriage void and enabling him to make Anne his queen. In the process, the church in England broke away from Rome. So Cromwell was a major force in reforming both the church and state.
Cromwell is vilified by the Catholic Church, expecially since he was behind the execution of Sir Thomas More, a vehemently conservative public figure who opposed Henry's divorce and who was subsequently made a saint by the Pope. Robert Bolt's famous play A Man For All Seasons features More as the main character, as a man to be admired for his personal integrity, but in so doing Cromwell is cast as the primary antagonist.
Mantel resets the balance in her novel by telling the same story entirely from Cromwell's point of view, by exploring his origins, detailing his family life, delving deeply into the machinations of the Henrician court (which seems to have been like a nest of vipers) to show just how tricky it was to exist there, and most of all by casting More as the antagonist: as a religious fanatic with little ability to make friends or see the world from anybody else's point of view. Cromwell is fully humanised and he comes across as a deeply intelligent, funny, self-aware and likeable man, forever watchful. He has a network of friends and acquaintances across Europe; constantly adopts proteges and relations into his family home; has a spiky personality but is able to either soothe or provoke at will.
As well as being brilliant on the historical detail and in its psychological depth, the novel is also both surprisingly funny and tender. There have been dozens of witty lines that have made me chortle, mostly spoken by the characters rather than the narrator, and they always occur naturally in the situation - the dialogue would work well as a screenplay or stageplay. I also quietly shed a tear when tragedy strikes on the domestic front quite early on in the story and Mantel made me feel Cromwell's pain. Another aspect that I really liked in the first half of the novel was the loving master-servant relationship between the cardinal and Cromwell, which was brilliantly created. In fact there's a whole host of wonderfully drawn characters, from the insecure King Henry and the Machiavellian Anne Boleyn to the ferocious Duke of Norfolk and the vindictive Master Secretary, Stephen Gardiner.
Despite all these strengths, I would say that Wolf Hall is not the easiest of reads. Mantel's narrative style is quite staccato and she also keeps jumping between timeframes. This, combined with the sheer weight of characters (fortunately there's a handy cast list at the front of the book) and her quirk of rarely referring to her main character by name (instead writing 'he', which can get confusing when there's a lot of men in the scene), has often made me stop and go back over a few lines to make sure I fully understand what's going on! I haven't read any of Mantel's other books so I assume this is her way of writing. It takes some getting used to but the pros far outweigh the cons.
So I'm looking forward to finishing this and will post again when I've done so.
And that's what is particularly great about it. Because Thomas Cromwell has a bit of a bad rep and to explain why I'd better give a few historical details. Cromwell was a lawyer of humble origins who worked his way up from nothing to become the chief employee of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England, who almost rivalled the King in terms of power and prestige. Wolsey fell from the King's graces when he was unable to secure the Pope's OK for Henry to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn, which Henry believed was vital if he was ever to produce a male heir and secure the Tudor dynasty. Despite Wolsey's fall from power and subsequent death, Cromwell was able to finagle his way into the King's household and within 12 months became his chief councillor. In the early 16th century, for a man of no family name to leap to the top of the political pile, vaulting over the squabbling dukes and courtiers who had tumbled the Cardinal, was an incredible feat. Cromwell proved himself to the King by working out how to legally establish Henry as the only authority figure in England, thereby rendering the Pope's hold over his first marriage void and enabling him to make Anne his queen. In the process, the church in England broke away from Rome. So Cromwell was a major force in reforming both the church and state.
Cromwell is vilified by the Catholic Church, expecially since he was behind the execution of Sir Thomas More, a vehemently conservative public figure who opposed Henry's divorce and who was subsequently made a saint by the Pope. Robert Bolt's famous play A Man For All Seasons features More as the main character, as a man to be admired for his personal integrity, but in so doing Cromwell is cast as the primary antagonist.
Mantel resets the balance in her novel by telling the same story entirely from Cromwell's point of view, by exploring his origins, detailing his family life, delving deeply into the machinations of the Henrician court (which seems to have been like a nest of vipers) to show just how tricky it was to exist there, and most of all by casting More as the antagonist: as a religious fanatic with little ability to make friends or see the world from anybody else's point of view. Cromwell is fully humanised and he comes across as a deeply intelligent, funny, self-aware and likeable man, forever watchful. He has a network of friends and acquaintances across Europe; constantly adopts proteges and relations into his family home; has a spiky personality but is able to either soothe or provoke at will.
As well as being brilliant on the historical detail and in its psychological depth, the novel is also both surprisingly funny and tender. There have been dozens of witty lines that have made me chortle, mostly spoken by the characters rather than the narrator, and they always occur naturally in the situation - the dialogue would work well as a screenplay or stageplay. I also quietly shed a tear when tragedy strikes on the domestic front quite early on in the story and Mantel made me feel Cromwell's pain. Another aspect that I really liked in the first half of the novel was the loving master-servant relationship between the cardinal and Cromwell, which was brilliantly created. In fact there's a whole host of wonderfully drawn characters, from the insecure King Henry and the Machiavellian Anne Boleyn to the ferocious Duke of Norfolk and the vindictive Master Secretary, Stephen Gardiner.
Despite all these strengths, I would say that Wolf Hall is not the easiest of reads. Mantel's narrative style is quite staccato and she also keeps jumping between timeframes. This, combined with the sheer weight of characters (fortunately there's a handy cast list at the front of the book) and her quirk of rarely referring to her main character by name (instead writing 'he', which can get confusing when there's a lot of men in the scene), has often made me stop and go back over a few lines to make sure I fully understand what's going on! I haven't read any of Mantel's other books so I assume this is her way of writing. It takes some getting used to but the pros far outweigh the cons.
So I'm looking forward to finishing this and will post again when I've done so.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
So many books...
Having recently committed myself to using this blog properly, I've been surfing around and reading many fascinating book-blogs. It's so wonderful to discover there are other people out there as interested in reading great books as I am and a blog is the perfect way to record one's thoughts and impressions.
The downside about reading all these blogs is that every one makes me want to add yet more books to my already hugely long TBR list!
On Facebook recently I completed a ticklist that was sent round of 100 books that it was suggested everybody should read. I have already read around 70 of them! My brother, who is certainly not as fervent a reader as I am, commented that I would have nothing left to read by the time I reach the age of 40. Fortunately this is not true: though I do want to read the very best books as soon as I possibly can, there are hundreds of them and there are already so many I'd like to re-read some time.
Re-reading is something I keep putting off as I've felt there are so many books I haven't got to yet that it might be a waste of time to read a book I've read before, even if it's a great one. But from looking at other blogs, I'm beginning to see the virtue of it. You already know the plot and the characters when you return to a favourite, so a re-read can uncover other pleasures that you may have missed the first time around. And of course, there are some books I may not have fully understood on a deeper level the first time I read them (when I was in a hurry to get on to the next one!), so a re-read could be a revelation.
Having said all that, there are dozens of unread books I already have in mind to enjoy this year, so re-reading will have to be put off for a little while longer!
My TBR list for this year includes, in no particular order:
Graham Greene - The Comedians
Evelyn Waugh - Sword of Honour
Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
James Joyce - Dubliners
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Homer - The Iliad
Peter Carey - Parrot And Olivier In America
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Martin Amis - Money
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Julian Barnes - A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters
Ian McEwan - The Innocent, Solar
J.G. Ballard - Empire Of The Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View Of Hills
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-5
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Patrick Susskind - Perfume
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Anthony Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Emile Zola - Nana
Stendhal - The Red And The Black
Thomas Hardy - The Return Of The Native
John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River
John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
An exhausting, but not necessarily exhaustive, list!
Will post some thoughts on Wolf Hall, which I'm still very much enjoying, tomorrow.
The downside about reading all these blogs is that every one makes me want to add yet more books to my already hugely long TBR list!
On Facebook recently I completed a ticklist that was sent round of 100 books that it was suggested everybody should read. I have already read around 70 of them! My brother, who is certainly not as fervent a reader as I am, commented that I would have nothing left to read by the time I reach the age of 40. Fortunately this is not true: though I do want to read the very best books as soon as I possibly can, there are hundreds of them and there are already so many I'd like to re-read some time.
Re-reading is something I keep putting off as I've felt there are so many books I haven't got to yet that it might be a waste of time to read a book I've read before, even if it's a great one. But from looking at other blogs, I'm beginning to see the virtue of it. You already know the plot and the characters when you return to a favourite, so a re-read can uncover other pleasures that you may have missed the first time around. And of course, there are some books I may not have fully understood on a deeper level the first time I read them (when I was in a hurry to get on to the next one!), so a re-read could be a revelation.
Having said all that, there are dozens of unread books I already have in mind to enjoy this year, so re-reading will have to be put off for a little while longer!
My TBR list for this year includes, in no particular order:
Graham Greene - The Comedians
Evelyn Waugh - Sword of Honour
Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
James Joyce - Dubliners
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Homer - The Iliad
Peter Carey - Parrot And Olivier In America
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Martin Amis - Money
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Julian Barnes - A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters
Ian McEwan - The Innocent, Solar
J.G. Ballard - Empire Of The Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View Of Hills
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-5
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Patrick Susskind - Perfume
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Anthony Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Emile Zola - Nana
Stendhal - The Red And The Black
Thomas Hardy - The Return Of The Native
John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River
John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
An exhausting, but not necessarily exhaustive, list!
Will post some thoughts on Wolf Hall, which I'm still very much enjoying, tomorrow.
Friday, January 14, 2011
A new start!
One of my many New Year resolutions is to restart this blog and from now on update it more than once annually! So...
My first read of the year was C.J. Sansom's 'Sovereign', the third in his series of crime novels set during the dramatic late years of Henry VIII's reign and narrated by the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who once again is pulled against his will into all sorts of political shenanigans.
I haven't read many crime genre novels but was attracted to the Shardlake series because of the historical setting. All English schoolchildren learn about Henry VIII, of course: the six wives are what first leap to mind, but his reign really was a significant one with the break from Rome and the beginnings of the modern state. I studied this fascinating period for two years when I took A-Level History and have since remained very interested in fat old Henry.
So I delved into Sansom's first in the series, 'Dissolution', a couple of Christmases ago and was amply rewarded with a great tale of murder and intrigue as Shardlake is tasked by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the killing of a royal commissioner sent to a Sussex monastery to total up just how much money the king would make out of the place upon its imminent destruction. The book reminded me of Umberto Eco's 'The Name Of The Rose', minus the heavy philosophizing but with heaps of historical detail, solid characterisations and a nice twisty plot. I now treat myself to a new instalment around every Christmas/New Year period. There are two more in the series and by the time I get to part five, 'Heartstone', in a couple of years I expect the sixth will have been published!
'Sovereign' was a pleasurable read. In brief, it is 1541 and Shardlake has been sent by Archbishop Cranmer to York to help arbitrate petitions to the king, who is travelling to the North with an enormous retinue to overawe the Yorkshire populace as they had recently risen up against him in protest at the vast religious changes sweeping the kingdom. Much is made of the contrasts between south and north Tudor England, which back then were almost like two separate countries. The people of York feel neglected by Henry and the atmosphere is explosive. Shardlake's other duty is to ensure the good health of a political prisoner, due to be transported to the Tower of London to be tortured into revealing details of the recent conspiracy. Things become even more complicated when a glazier removing stained glass windows from the dissolved city abbey dies a horrible death and Shardlake finds out more than he wanted to know about the king's true ancestry.
The novel is very cleverly plotted, full of juicy thrills, the usual excellent historical background and some great characters. However, it didn't always warrant its 650 pages. At times it plodded along with too much extraneous detail and repetitive, expository dialogue. Sansom must have wanted to make sure the reader understood the complicated family tree of the Tudors but at times his obviously wide historical knowledge didn't quite integrate with the flow of the storytelling and so in parts the book became heavy-handed. The last parts dragged somewhat, though a scene in the dungeons of the Tower was really gripping. The novel could have done with some closer proof-reading. For example, there was one point when Shardlake said he had no time to put on his cloak, having risen early from bed to attend to some emergency, but on the next page he lifted his cloak to ensure it didn't trail in the mud! Still, though Sansom won't ever be feted for the quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he certainly knows a lot about the mechanics of whodunit plot. All in all, a fun way to start my reading in 2011.
I've decided to continue my immersion in the Tudor world by finally getting around to reading Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall', which won the 2009 Man Booker prize and is about the life of Thomas Cromwell, portraying him not as the brutal enforcer he is usually seen as but as a fully-rounded, sympathetically rendered human being. I'm 150 pages in so far and as well as being magnificent it's an interesting contrast to Sansom's series. The setting's the same and both authors are good at conjuring up the period, but it's clear that Mantel is a great writer of literature as opposed to 'just' a genre author. It's an absolute delight so far and difficult to put down. More details soon.
My first read of the year was C.J. Sansom's 'Sovereign', the third in his series of crime novels set during the dramatic late years of Henry VIII's reign and narrated by the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who once again is pulled against his will into all sorts of political shenanigans.
I haven't read many crime genre novels but was attracted to the Shardlake series because of the historical setting. All English schoolchildren learn about Henry VIII, of course: the six wives are what first leap to mind, but his reign really was a significant one with the break from Rome and the beginnings of the modern state. I studied this fascinating period for two years when I took A-Level History and have since remained very interested in fat old Henry.
So I delved into Sansom's first in the series, 'Dissolution', a couple of Christmases ago and was amply rewarded with a great tale of murder and intrigue as Shardlake is tasked by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the killing of a royal commissioner sent to a Sussex monastery to total up just how much money the king would make out of the place upon its imminent destruction. The book reminded me of Umberto Eco's 'The Name Of The Rose', minus the heavy philosophizing but with heaps of historical detail, solid characterisations and a nice twisty plot. I now treat myself to a new instalment around every Christmas/New Year period. There are two more in the series and by the time I get to part five, 'Heartstone', in a couple of years I expect the sixth will have been published!
'Sovereign' was a pleasurable read. In brief, it is 1541 and Shardlake has been sent by Archbishop Cranmer to York to help arbitrate petitions to the king, who is travelling to the North with an enormous retinue to overawe the Yorkshire populace as they had recently risen up against him in protest at the vast religious changes sweeping the kingdom. Much is made of the contrasts between south and north Tudor England, which back then were almost like two separate countries. The people of York feel neglected by Henry and the atmosphere is explosive. Shardlake's other duty is to ensure the good health of a political prisoner, due to be transported to the Tower of London to be tortured into revealing details of the recent conspiracy. Things become even more complicated when a glazier removing stained glass windows from the dissolved city abbey dies a horrible death and Shardlake finds out more than he wanted to know about the king's true ancestry.
The novel is very cleverly plotted, full of juicy thrills, the usual excellent historical background and some great characters. However, it didn't always warrant its 650 pages. At times it plodded along with too much extraneous detail and repetitive, expository dialogue. Sansom must have wanted to make sure the reader understood the complicated family tree of the Tudors but at times his obviously wide historical knowledge didn't quite integrate with the flow of the storytelling and so in parts the book became heavy-handed. The last parts dragged somewhat, though a scene in the dungeons of the Tower was really gripping. The novel could have done with some closer proof-reading. For example, there was one point when Shardlake said he had no time to put on his cloak, having risen early from bed to attend to some emergency, but on the next page he lifted his cloak to ensure it didn't trail in the mud! Still, though Sansom won't ever be feted for the quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he certainly knows a lot about the mechanics of whodunit plot. All in all, a fun way to start my reading in 2011.
I've decided to continue my immersion in the Tudor world by finally getting around to reading Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall', which won the 2009 Man Booker prize and is about the life of Thomas Cromwell, portraying him not as the brutal enforcer he is usually seen as but as a fully-rounded, sympathetically rendered human being. I'm 150 pages in so far and as well as being magnificent it's an interesting contrast to Sansom's series. The setting's the same and both authors are good at conjuring up the period, but it's clear that Mantel is a great writer of literature as opposed to 'just' a genre author. It's an absolute delight so far and difficult to put down. More details soon.
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