Man is Wolf to Man

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.