book review of wolf hall

from the book review archives

Review: ‘Wolf Hall,’ by Hilary Mantel

This fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s scheming aide Thomas Cromwell — the first volume in a trilogy — won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

Credit... Petra Börner

Supported by

• Share full article

By Christopher Benfey

• Oct. 21, 2021

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel | Review first published Oct. 29, 2009

“Try always,” says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel’s fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s turbulent court, “to find out what people wear under their clothes.” Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can’t produce an heir, wears a nun’s habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won’t let the king know what she’s wearing until their wedding night; she says “yes, yes, yes” to him, “then she says no.” Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king’s dirty work just as he once did the cardinal’s, what is he hiding under his lawyer’s sober winter robes? Something “impermeable,” Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell’s forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone.

Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel — tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were “a sheet of metal”; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because “France is where they have wars.” Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family.

In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian “art of memory” (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel “Fludd”), in which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images.

Cromwell is also, as Mantel sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther’s battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the “brutal truth” of the Scriptures. “Why does the pope have to be in Rome?” Cromwell wonders. “Where is it written?” Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn’s “resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom” caught the king’s eye. Mantel, with the novelist’s license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: “Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked.” Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For Mantel, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry’s divorce is the impetus for Cromwell’s “Tudor Revolution,” as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule.

In “Wolf Hall” it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormentor of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the “quaking world” aright. “Utopia,” Cromwell learns early on, “is not a place one can live.” More’s refusal to recognize Henry’s marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” and its 1966 screen version. To Mantel’s Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt’s title, seeks a way out for his old rival.

‘Wolf Hall’ has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike.

There’s a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? “You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again.” Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell’s. “That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash.”

In her long novel of the French Revolution, “A Place of Greater Safety,” Mantel also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of “Wolf Hall.” Yet, although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels — the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase — her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, “the man in charge of everything,” falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us.

Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. 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. “When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power,” Cromwell reflects. “Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.” Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is both spellbinding and believable.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

10 Best Books of 2024:  The staff of The New York Times Book Review has chosen the year’s top fiction and nonfiction . For even more great reads, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024 .

Cormac McCarthy’s Secret:  Revelations about a relationship between the author and a girl who was 16 when they met shocked readers, but not scholars of his work. Now there’s a debate about how much she influenced his writing .

Giving Thanks Every Day:  In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, “The Serviceberry,” the “Braiding Sweetgrass” author proposes gratitude as an antidote  to prevailing views of nature as a commodity.

A Raw Portrait of War:  In their new collections, the Palestinian poets Mosab Abu Toha and Najwan Darwish share unvarnished views of destruction, displacement and loss .

The Book Review Podcast:  Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

by Hilary Mantel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2009

Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor.

Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII’s schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn.

Versatile British novelist Mantel ( Giving Up the Ghost , 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (1527–35) of Henry’s long, tumultuous reign. They’re chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father’s beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope’s permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings’ children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel’s language is original, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8050-8068-1

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009

HISTORICAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Hilary Mantel

BOOK REVIEW

by Hilary Mantel ; edited by Nicholas Pearson

by Hilary Mantel

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

IN THE NEWS

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Roy Jacobsen

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC.   All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

general information | review summaries | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Why we haven't reviewed it yet: Haven't gotten our hands on a copy yet Chances that we will review it: Slim -- like her work, and the reviews make it sound tempting, but it's still a heap of historical fiction - Return to top of the page -

   Review Consensus :   Very positive -- and see it as a possible breakout book for her    From the Reviews : " Wolf Hall is a fantastically well-wrought, detailed and convincing novel (....) There is so much to praise in Wolf Hall (.....) Despite its length, the pace is fast. A couple of hundred pages in, you feel as if you might drown in its volume. But you emerge at the end dazed and moved, properly infected by the period. It both is and isn�t an easy read. (...) But where Mantel really excels is in the small, dark stuff." - Julie Myerson, Financial Times "In Wolf Hall , Mantel persuasively depicts this beefy pen-pusher and backstairs manoeuvrer as one of the most appealing -- and, in his own way, enlightened -- characters of the period. (...) How do you write about Henry VIII without being camp or breathless or making him do something clunkily non-stereotypical ? Mantel attacks the problem from several angles, starting by knowing a lot about the period but not drawing attention to how strenuously she's imagining it. Meaty dialogue takes precedence over description, and the present-tense narration is so closely tied to the main character that Cromwell is usually called plain "he", even when it causes ambiguities. Above all, Mantel avoids ye olde-style diction, preferring more contemporary phrasing. (...) Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it's not like much else in contemporary British fiction." - Christopher Tayler, The Guardian "Mantel's writing is taut; the dialogue sprints along, witty and convincing. She draws her extensive cast with deft strokes." - Marianne Brace, The Independent "Mantel�s chief method is to pick out tableaux vivants from the historical record -- which she has worked over with great care -- and then to suggest that they have an inward aspect which is completely unlike the version presented in history books. The result is less a historical novel than an alternative history novel. It constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew. (...) Mantel�s ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional." - Colin Burrow, London Review of Books "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 Tudor England." - Ross King, The Los Angeles Times "In the hands of Hilary Mantel, Tudor kitsch becomes something darker and less digestible. Wolf Hall takes a forensic slice through a nation caught between feudalism and capitalism, the Middle Ages and modernity, Catholicism and the revolutionary doctrines emerging from the Continent. (...) Mantel�s prose, like her hero, is witty and tough-minded." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman "Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, 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 "This witty, densely populated book may experience a rough passage when it crosses the Atlantic. For readers not fully versed in the nuances of England�s tangled royal bloodlines, not amused by Ms. Mantel�s deliberate obliqueness (...) or not even familiar with the effect of the law of praemunire on the papacy, Wolf Hall has its share of stumbling blocks. (...) But 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." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. 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. (...) Hilary Mantel�s Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable." - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review "Mantel�s characters do not speak sixteenth-century English. She has created for them an idiom that combines a certain archaism with vigorous modern English. It works perfectly. And how urbane her people are! (...) The prose is elastic. Sometimes it�s elliptical. (...) Elsewhere it is full, or overfull." - Joan Acocella, The New Yorker "Plot summary, for a 560-page novel that offers at its outset two charts of family trees and five pages of character names, proves a bit impractical. (...) Dialogue sings and crackles, in language that is at once lyrical, decorous and slangily modern (.....) His brilliant company, and the life-size pageant of his world, give such sustained pleasure that we are greedy for particulars of a story whose outcome, in theory, we already know." - Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle "Mantel's triumph is to take a figure associated with ambition, scheming and avarice and transform him into a sympathetic, humane and supremely modern man. (...) Mantel's approach is oblique and ingenious. (...) Wolf Hall manages to unite her interests thus far. It is a novel about power, both political and supernatural, in which Cromwell manipulates the invisible web of profit just as disgruntled priests conjure up expedient prophets. Accountancy and astrology vie with each other." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday "With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell (.....) She creates immediacy by using the present tense, and a sense of intimacy with the characters through dialogue. She gives their language period touches, but never falls into pastiche. The pieces of the jigsaw may be familiar, but she shuffles them around so that the full picture emerges only gradually, in bright fragments." - Anne Chisholm, The Spectator "(A) vibrant, often compelling mix of the personal and the political (.....) Cromwell is an arrestingly complex figure in Mantel�s retelling. (...) The book has many other alluring qualities. Mantel�s characterisation is acute (...) Above all, Mantel�s recreation of the era feels both accurate and natural. By focusing, not on the famous set-pieces, but on the human interaction taking place around them, she makes the reader complicit in the drama. (...) The effect, sadly, is to turn a potentially outstanding novel into merely a commendable one." - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times "This is a splendidly ambitious book, ample enough to hold a crowd of people and to encompass historical events across all of Europe (the sack of Rome is described in one vivid paragraph) and hint at at least another novel�s worth of themes." - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Telegraph "In lesser hands Cromwell�s modern sympathies -- believing in nurture over nature, loving over burning, learning over prayer -- might make for a lifeless and anachronistic portrait. But the devil is in the language and Mantel animates the familiar story with great imagination. (...) Mantel knows how to build a picture from the parts available, with nothing extraneous and everything layered." - Claudia FitzHerbert, The Telegraph "But as soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle -- one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too." - Vanora Bennett, The Times "Unusually for a novel 650 pages long, Wolf Hall is written in the present tense, which enhances its feverishness. This lends both people and their possessions a dramatic clarity, a presence, which an informed, retrospective viewpoint, left almost entirely to the reader�s imagination, might have marred. We are not looking back at a path through time, but trying to find our way onward, and uncertainty reigns. (...) In this way, the novel becomes a play, becomes a gallery, conscious of its own framing devices, and is all the richer for being a historiographical as well as a historical novel." - Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement "Ms. Mantel has a knack for getting under the skin of her characters and capturing them (one feels) as they must have been" - Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal "(F)rom this seemingly shopworn material, Hilary Mantel has created 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. (...) Wolf Hall is uncompromising and unsentimental, though alert readers will detect an underlying strain of gruff tenderness. Similarly, Mantel's prose is as plain as her protagonist (who's sensitive about his looks), but also (like Cromwell) extraordinarily flexible, subtle and shrewd." - Wendy Smith, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

Notes about the Reviews and the Book's Reception :

About the Author :

       English author Hilary Mantel was born in 1952. Author of several highly praised novels, she won the Hawthornden Prize in 1996.

© 2009-2010 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

• Commenting Policy
• Advanced Search

Dear Author

Romance, Historical, Contemporary, Paranormal, Young Adult, Book reviews, industry news, and commentary from a reader's point of view

REVIEW: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I sometimes feel like I’ve been reading or watching historical fiction based on the reign of Henry VIII since childhood. Probably my first memories of any knowledge of this period in English history were school lessons where I somehow gleaned that Henry had eight wives and cut off all of their heads (I may have briefly confused him with Bluebeard; I *was* young). As a young adult I read up on the era where I could and watched Anne of the Thousand Days (probably one of the more sympathetic portraits of Anne Boleyn I’ve come across, IIRC) and memorized the order of Henry’s wives and their fates (“divorced, beheaded, died in childbirth, divorced, beheaded, outlived him”). Later there were Philippa Gregory novels and The Tudors on cable. The latter is not anything I’d suggest for those looking for historical accuracy, but it did give a good overview of the period and the players; it may have been through that show that I first became really aware of Thomas Cromwell as a historical figure.

Wolf Hall focuses on Thomas Cromwell and tells the story of his meteoric rise from the abused son of a blacksmith to self-made man to right-hand adviser to Henry VIII. Through his eyes we get to see many of the familiar faces of the era: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, Thomas Cranmer, and of course, Henry himself. (It says something about that era that I think of that list 50% of them ended up beheaded.)

The writing style of Wolf Hall is idiosyncratic and thus I found it hard to get into, at first. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I am terrible with identifying narrative styles unless they are pretty basic: first person present tense, first person past tense, etc. I just knew I found the style in this novel confusing. So I looked it up: Wolf Hall is written in third person limited present tense. The reader gets Cromwell’s POV only, though it takes a while for that to be totally clear.

What made the style most confusing is that the pronoun “he” is used constantly, but often it wasn’t clear which “he” was being referred to. I had to train myself to realize that when I got lost, it was a safe bet that the “he” in question was Cromwell himself. This sounds frustrating and bewildering, and at first it was, but I did figure it out fairly quickly and once I was in the right mindset, I actually enjoyed the style. (I mean, I wouldn’t want to read it all the time – present tense is more suited to first person in my mind and even then I don’t always like it – but it ended up working for Wolf Hall .)

(There were still times when I had to go back over dialogue because if there was a run of say, 20 lines of dialogue, I could get lost as to who was speaking because there was never any indication – e.g. “Anne said” attached to a line of dialogue. But that didn’t happen that often.)

The thing I found most interesting about Wolf Hall was the portrayal of Cromwell himself. Again, I was most familiar with the representation from The Tudors , and that was not a kind one – that Cromwell was cruel and grasping. A little Googling confirms that history in general does not view Cromwell with favor, but in Wolf Hall he’s a very sympathetic character. Perhaps this is a due to the fact that the story is told from Cromwell’s POV; getting inside a character’s head, even in the third person, tends to make that character more understandable because you’re seeing the world through his eyes.

Even inside his head, Cromwell is a difficult man to really know. His thoughts and emotions tend to be muted, and it’s only through subtle cues, for instance, that the reader feels his grief at the loss, through illness, of his wife and daughters, or his dismay at the long, slow fall of his patron and mentor, Cardinal Woolsey.

As portrayed in the book, Cromwell is not a vengeful man – he lets the many insults about his origins slide off his back, and he gives his antagonist Thomas More many chances to repent and seems to regret More’s eventual execution. (More, in another switch-around, is not given the heroic treatment he’s often afforded in other historical portraits; here, he’s a pedantic and small-minded religious zealot who is smug until almost the bitter end. Though he may be ill-treated by Henry for sincerely held religious convictions, he himself tortured others without mercy when the shoe was on the other foot.)

However, if Cromwell seems less petty and ego-driven than many of the other characters in the novel, there are hints that he has a deep capacity for remembering a slight. The most chilling instance comes when the reader realizes that the young musician in Woolsey’s household whom Cromwell, early in the book, overhears casually insulting him is Mark Smeaton. If you know your Tudor history, you recognize Smeaton as one of the men eventually tortured and executed as a lover of Anne Boleyn. This book ends with More’s execution; I believe the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies , deals with Anne’s fall, but the way Cromwell keeps an eye on Smeaton in Wolf Hall and maneuvers him into a place where he can gain revenge on him is a reminder that while he may be sympathetic (to this reader, at least), Cromwell is not a man to be crossed.

In doing a little research for this review, I discovered that Wolf Hall has been criticized in some quarters for a lack of historical accuracy and for being “anti-Catholic.” On the first charge, it’s hard to know how to feel – Wolf Hall , is after all, fiction, and most of the instances of supposed inaccuracy cited seemed to have to do not with outright manipulation of historical facts but with imbuing Cromwell’s character with thoughts and feelings for which there is no historical basis. But, I mean, again, it’s FICTION. Even actual historical biography often (maybe even usually) has some slant and interpretation to it, so I can’t really ding a work of fiction for having a perspective, even if it’s a non-conventional one. It’s not like the story goes off in a completely unsupported direction, I don’t think, in portraying More as, say, a lecher or a cynic – it just puts his religious severity in a less favorable light than one usually sees.

More tortured people and Cromwell tortured people – I think the historical record is pretty clear on that. There appears to be some evidence (again, simply gleaned from some Googling) that More was enthusiastic about torture, or at least about burning heretics. One could argue that he believed he was doing their eternal souls a favor, but still – somebody who expresses relish over burning a human being to death is not saintly in my mind, and criticism of such a person is fair.

As for Cromwell, I haven’t read the sequel, Bring up the Bodies , yet, never mind the yet-unpublished third book, so it’s possible that his character changes later, and his finer feelings get pushed aside in his ruthless rise to power. But I think Mantel manages to create an interesting and plausible portrait of a man who is complex, pragmatic, sometimes ruthless, and yet ultimately sympathetic.

Regarding the anti-Catholicism charge, I didn’t really see it – the Catholic Church in England at the time is portrayed as corrupt and greedy, but I certainly don’t think that’s an unfair depiction. Protestants are not exactly portrayed as being on the “right” side – Henry’s turn away from the Church of Rome clearly has to do with the Church’s refusal to grant him a divorce and with his desire to get his hands on the Church’s riches in England, riches he seems to believe rightfully belong to the King. I think actual religious conviction is a distant third on the list of reasons for Henry’s break.

Cromwell shows sympathy for dissidents (and gives them aid at times), but he doesn’t seem to be hugely religious either way – like Henry, his reasons for supporting the break with Rome seem more pragmatic than anything else. He does recall an early memory of being a child and witnessing the burning of some Lollards, an event that apparently had an effect on him, but he seems more distressed by the bloodlust he sees on display than anything else. Again, Cromwell’s passions – anger, lust, or any other strong emotion – feel muted in general throughout the book. His driving force is obviously personal ambition, but even that’s made clearer through his actions than his thoughts.

Why do I feel the need to defend Wolf Hall against the criticisms of it? Well, I like the book, for one thing. But it also goes to my beliefs about what leeway I think a historical author should have (as opposed to a biographer, who I do believe has a duty to avoid prejudice as much as possible). This probably wouldn’t be an issue if the novel hadn’t won the prestigious Booker Prize – I mean, I don’t recall people getting that het up about Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter , which I think we’ll agree is probably less historically accurate than Wolf Hall . I think because Wolf Hall is popular and prominent and well-written and researched enough to be seen as scholarly, historians get themselves a bit twisted in knots over artistic license when they really don’t need to be.

If you’re interested in the period and the players and don’t come to the story with a strong prejudice against Thomas Cromwell to start, I think Wolf Hall can be read and enjoyed as the well-written historical fiction about a fascinating man that it is. My grade for it was a high B+.

(BTW, PBS just recently began running a BBC adaption of the book. I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to catch it soon. Damian Lewis plays Henry VIII!)

Best regards,

Amazon BN Kobo ARE Book Depository Google

Share this:

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

I’m quite fond of this interpretation: http://the-toast.net/2015/04/08/hilary-mantels-wolf-hall/#idc-cover Enjoy!

Welcome to the party! Wolf Hall/Bring up the Bodies are two of my favorite books ever. I’ve been through them three times, and now with the TV show being aired, I feel the need for another reread. Among the many things I enjoy about Mantel’s writing are the little flashes of humor. For instance if you look at the cast of characters, you’ll see that Mark Smeaton is described as a ‘suspiciously well-dressed’ musician. Now that’s funny. Also there’s a character whose last name is Wriothesley. He is always telling people ‘call me Risley’ so they can pronounce his name properly. Cromwell refers to him as ‘Call-me.’

I haven’t seen the adaptation yet, but it’s on my Netflix queue. Can’t wait for book three and would like to read some more Mantel.

@ Katrina : This is so awesome! (I was confused early on about the title and also about Cromwell’s weird-ish crush on Jane Seymour.)

Kilian Metcalf – I highly recommend Mantel’s novel of the French Revolution – “A Place of Greater Safety.” It’s not quite as compelling as the Cromwell books, but it’s along the same lines – the protagonists are Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins. Excellent book.

@ Kilian Metcalf : I forgot to mention about the sly humor of the book and of Cromwell in particular – I loved “Call-me.”

I’m looking forward to “Bring Up the Bodies” but I have such a weird affection for this version of Thomas Cromwell that I’m wary of the third book (though interesting to see if he’ll be as detached and philosophical about his own execution as he is about most things).

The problem for the historians (and me) is that this isn’t a re-imagining of who Cromwell could be. When Cromwell was given a writ of attainder, his papers were seized and he kept careful copies of every letter he’d written as well as all that were received. These papers are still available for researchers today.

In them, there are series of letters where Cromwell promises the King that he’ll get some nobleman back from exile to face an English executioner, and then turns around and writes to the exile that the King’s mercy is infinite or some such. So, that Cromwell is a lying, scheming, double-dealer is a fact in the historical record, not the perhaps biased opinion of contemporaries, like Thomas More.

While if you are attentive, in Wolf Hall, you can note some less than kind things Cromwell does, you are in his head and he comes across as a good guy. You never see the lies, the scheming. Because the book is so detailed and the details are correct, you have the impression that the fundamental character of Cromwell is correct, too. Certainly, all of my book club thought that Cromwell as good guy was at least a real possibility. But he was a lying, scheming sleaze and anyone who doubts it can read his own letters and journals.

Wolf Hall was too hard to read, until you realize it doesn’t matter who said what. The dialogue was exposition on the political themes of the time and if after several lines, you don’t know who said what, it doesn’t matter. Now, I think that should be a problem. It’s a book about politics, but the political opinions of the chars don’t really matter. Equally, when you lose track of who the “he” refers to, it doesn’t matter for the understanding, either.

However, the book was popular and really a long, detailed account of a political dispute which we all know the outcome of, and that it managed to get so many fans (and that I managed to get to the end of it) is an amazing feat.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the magic was. I think it was all that research and getting the feel of Tudor daily life right in minute details.

I loved this book. Mantel’s writing just gets me. For all that her books can be quite dense, I feel absorbed every time I open them. There have been quite a few interviews lately on the bookish podcasts I listen to (probably due to the TV series coming out) and in many there have been excerpts. Usually if they’re reading out excerpts I’ve already read I tend to skip those bits, but here I listened to every way, completely absorbed again.

Re: not knowing who’s speaking, yes, that can be an issue (it doesn’t help that so many characters are called Thomas!). It’s a problem that Mantel herself has acknowledged many readers have had, and certainly, in the second book when Cromwell is speaking she tends to use “he, Cromwell,”, rather than simply “he”.

@ SAO : I don’t think Cromwell was a good guy, particularly – I don’t think any of them were. I think it was pretty hard to be a good guy and survive in the Tudor Court. But I do think he comes off as sympathetic and understandable (moreso than many of the other characters, anyway).

While it may seem deceptive to portray his thoughts sympathetically while ignoring things that make him seem less sympathetic, I still think as historical fiction it’s within bounds.

FTC Disclaimer

We do not purchase all the books we review here. Some we receive from the authors, some we receive from the publisher, and some we receive through a third party service like Net Galley . Some books we purchase ourselves. Login

Discover more from Dear Author

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel Book Review

• Rebecca Skane
• Historical Fiction
• No responses
• May 30, 2015

I’ve indulged in a number of books on Tudor historical fiction including the Philippa Gregory novels – and who didn’t watch The Tudors on Showtime? Wolf Hall , Tudor-inspired historical fiction revolving around the life of Thomas Cromwell and the first in the Thomas Cromwell  trilogy, was published fairly recently and quickly won a bevy of awards including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critic Circle Award. Hardcover | Henry Holt & Co. | 2009 | 532pp

Thomas Cromwell was an ambitious man who rose at a meteoric pace for someone of his humble lineage, managing to become Privy Councillor by Henry VIII where he held a number of positions. He was widely considered a malevolent character in the king’s council and has often been one bathed in negative personality distinctions by several authors. But in Mantel’s Wolf Hall , Cromwell is seen as more of a hero.

Wolf Hall begins with a rough upbringing. Mantel imagines a young Cromwell at the hands of a drunken, abusive father. At the urging of his sister, he leaves home as a young boy before his father can kill him. Shown through flashbacks here and there, she then envisions a wild assortment of adventures and opportunities that led him to his career as an adviser to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

A picture of Cromwell is painted as a good man – ambitious as ever, but generally good. He’s a loving husband, a hands-on father, a wise and cunning intellectual, multilingual, and entirely devoted to the people who support him, especially Wolsey. After Wolsey is arrested for going against the king’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon, but officially for creating a sovereign empire of Catholicism within England, Cromwell expects to be sent to the tower himself. But after a meeting with the king, a new life at court is ensured and Thomas becomes involved with aiding the king’s annulment, his proposed marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the beginning of the protestant reformation.

His vision that combined major players and social agendas within a room caught my attention:

“He looks around the room. That’s where the Lord Chancellor sat. On his left, the hungry merchants. On his right, the new ambassador. There, Humphrey Monmouth, the heretic. There, Antonio Bonvisi. Here, Thomas Cromwell. And there are ghostly places set, for the Duke of Suffolk large and bland, for Norfolk jangling his holy medals, and shouting ‘By the Mass!’ There is a place set for the king, and for the doughty little queen, famished in this penitential season, her belly quaking inside the stout armor of her robes. There is a place set for Lady Anne, glancing around with her restless black eyes, eating nothing, missing nothing, tugging at the pearls around her little neck. There is a place for William Tyndale, and one for the Pope; Clement looks at the candied quinces, too coarsely cut, and his Medici lip curls. And there sits Brother Martin Luther, greasy and fat: glowering at them all, and spitting out his fish bones.”

Cromwell’s negative impression of Anne Boleyn isn’t limited to this paragraph. Cromwell despises her and Mantel makes her out to be every bit of the conniving wench Cromwell hates. Yet, he is bound by the King to help her become Queen of England.

“He goes to see Anne. A thorn between two roses, she is sitting with her cousin Mary Shelton, and her brother’s wife, Jane, Lady Rochford.”

Jane? A “rose”? Perhaps at this point, but we can see where this is going. Cromwell expresses constant ‘digs’ at Anne and in a way it shows Cromwell’s sense of humor. Some insults were directly to her face and I couldn’t help it – I giggled.

Any page you land on in this book is bound to have a quotable quote. I dog-eared thirty or so pages and my highlighter ran dry.

“The multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down – for the novelty of the thing … But what do they get by change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and lean man.”

Wolf Hall is a completely different take on Cromwell, turning a man with a tainted reputation into one with honor and dignity. Although I enjoyed the twist on the characters of Cromwell and Lady Anne, and although I found too many quotes to love, I truly did have a hard time reading this novel.  It’s long, complex, and an arduous read. There’s a lot of dialogue, numerous players, and stretches of passages where nothing but back-and-forth bickering prevails. This is not a casual read and my enjoyment was lost on many occasions.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Tagged: Henry VIII , historical fiction , Thomas Cromwell , Tudor , Wolf Hall

Rebecca Skane is the editor-in-chief for the Portsmouth Review. She holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Lawrence University in Wisconsin and resides in Ashland, NH with her two children. She is the founder of The Portsmouth Book Club which boasts over 1,000 members. She also doubles as a professional escapist. Her genres are scifi and fantasy, both adult and young adult - but she often reads outside of her preferred genres. You can follow her on GoodReads . Aside from her love of good books, she is a professional website developer, content editor, and SEO expert. You can visit her web design and development site at RebeccaSkane.com .

You may also like...

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan Book Review

March 23, 2019

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris Book Review

March 16, 2019

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles Book Review

January 26, 2019

© Copyright 2023 The Portsmouth Review - All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service  

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Embed our reviews widget for this book

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

December 2 – 6, 2024

• The history of lesbian pulp fiction
• In conversation about Gaza, America, and genocide
• The novel’s relationship to colonization