book review of wolf hall

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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

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by Hilary Mantel ; edited by Nicholas Pearson

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Hilary Mantel Puzzles Out Her Origin Story

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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

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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

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

New York Times Bestseller

by Yaa Gyasi ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016

A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.

A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.

Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.

Pub Date: June 7, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Yaa Gyasi

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Renaissance Men

By christopher benfey, published: october 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.

Illustration by Esther Pearl Watson

By Hilary Mantel

532 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $27

Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize (October 7, 2009)

Times topic: hilary mantel.

Excerpt: ‘Wolf Hall’ (Google Books)

Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘Wolf Hall’ (October 5, 2009)

Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein’s great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his “good eyes’ stern, facetious twinkle,” in Robert Lowell’s description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, “sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.” One of the many achievements of Mantel’s dazzling novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize , is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours.

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 tormenter 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.

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.

Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of “Degas in New Orleans” and “A Summer of Hummingbirds.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 1, 2009, on page BR 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Renaissance Men.

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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!)

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: wolf hall by hilary mantel, wolf hall…, about the book:.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Shortlisted for the Orange Prize Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award

England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor.

Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

My Thoughts:

I was daunted by this novel from the outset and this never really receded even whilst reading; it’s taken me three weeks to get through it, in fits and bursts, so that in itself is indicative of my experience. It’s not only on the long side of long, but it’s dense with history, politics, details upon details about people who all seemed to be only ever called one of six names. I’m certain that I’d have had no idea what was going on at all if I weren’t familiar with Tudor, and even Plantagenet, English history. And yet, I never once considered abandoning it. What is it about this novel, that was all at once both compelling and daunting in equal measure? The further into it I got, the more it gripped me, even though I was still manically checking and double checking the table of contents just in case I was mistaken that there were still eighty pages of tiny print left in the chapter! This novel is a beast, of both burden and glory, and even after reaching the end – at last! – I was compelled to pick up Bring Up the Bodies immediately, so that I could keep reading about these historical figures whose fate I am already familiar with. I guess this is why Hilary Mantel has won the Man Booker twice now, with a third listing just announced for The Mirror and the Light. Before we go on though, I resisted starting the next one; I need a break from this level of absorbed reading, but it is on hand for when I’m ready to tackle the next instalment.

‘You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.’

My feelings about Cromwell prior to reading Wolf Hall were not positive. I had him pegged as a parasitic, greedy, power hungry, manipulator. Mantel’s Cromwell is much more dimensional than that. He is clever, cunning and brutal, a survivor who has raised himself up in ways that not many could have. His talents are many, his foresight and ability to make himself indispensable second to none. What caught me by surprise was his loyalty and decency, traits that I expected him to be devoid of. Particularly with regards to his family and household, and indeed, it was during his interactions with these people whom he lived and worked closest with that the novel was at its finest. There was humour, warmth, affection, and respect shown throughout Cromwell’s household that was progressive for the times. Mantel has certainly given us all a complex man to become invested in. A villain that has had his villainy reshaped and presented in a much more appealing, and human, way. He would have to be, wouldn’t he, to sustain reader investment over three very long books.

‘What he senses is a great net is spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received. Those who want access to the king expect to pay for it, and no one has better access than he. And at the same time, the word is out: help Cromwell and he will help you. Be loyal, be diligent, be intelligent on his behalf; you will come into a reward. Those who commit their service to him will be promoted and protected. He is a good friend and master; this is said of him everywhere.’

Mantel has created an entire world within this novel, one that is atmospheric in the most finite of detail. There is both big history and small history woven through the narrative. Less a story about King Henry VIII and more a story about England during his reign. The separation from Catholicism and the Vatican, the quest to assert dominance over its own wealth, the volatility of Scotland and Ireland; and yes, the whims of a king determined to fight fate by making his own rules. It’s all very gripping and compelling, written with a style that is engaging and intelligent, as well as clearly informed. You’ll probably get no better, or more entertaining, history lesson on this era than from the pages of this novel, and the following two, no doubt. The challenge this novel posed was worth overcoming in the end. It may be some time before I’ve finished the trilogy entirely, but it will happen. I’d like to see where Mantel takes us, despite knowing the end point in advance.

About the Author:

Hilary Mantel is the author of fourteen books, including A Place Of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up The Ghost, and the short-story collection The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher. Her two most recent novels, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies, have both been awarded the Man Booker Prize – an unprecedented achievement.

Wolf Hall Published by 4th Estate – GB

Book 2 of The Isolation Lucky Dip Reading List

Book Review: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. Amazon.co.uk

Wolf Hall was one of the first audio books I purchased… and it was – and remains – gorgeous! But I had listened to it some years ago. Back in 2010 to be precise, before this blog existed! And it is a novel I have cited on occasion on various other posts over the years which felt weird without a review to link it to. So that, plus the release of The Mirror and the Light tempted me to do something I almost never do: a re-read.

And it is a massive testament to the novel that it warranted and repaid that re-read!

From the opening pages the world of sixteenth century England leapt from the page! The grime and brutality of that exquisite opening scene as Cromwell cowers before his father’s boot is as vivid and gripping as anything I have read – ever!

So now get up.’ Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father’s first effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut. ‘So now get up!’ Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next.

That stitching and twine and leather that fills the imagination!

And the next chapter juxtaposes that with richness and luxury of Wolsey’s chambers where the Cardinal stands before the tapestry of King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba – whose image recalls for Cromwell Anselma, a girl her knew in Antwerp. And the Cardinal is

dressed not in his everyday scarlet, but in blackish purple and fine white lace: like a humble bishop. His height impresses; his belly, which should in justice belong to a more sedentary man, is merely another princely aspect of his being, and on it, confidingly, he often rests a large, white, beringed hand.

These characters live and breathe as few characters do in books. They are exceptionally well crafted as Mantel grafts flesh on the historical bones, performs some alchemy to turn history into characterisation.

That alchemy comes from many many wonderful features of the novel. Cromwell’s unfailing expertise whether in the legal courtroom or the Royal Court, whether in business or in war could have been overbearing. If he were merely the character that More describes

‘Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,’ says Thomas More, ‘and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’

he would not have the presence that he does. Because Mantel manages to balance this so well with a delicate sense of vulnerability and loss. Wolsey felt like a figure from another age in contrast and yet the relationship between the two was palpable and his loss heart breaking. In fact many characters in the Court felt like something from a different feudal age (I loved the description of Norfolk rattling when he walked because of all his relics) being left behind as Cromwell and his brethren strode into the future.

The minor characters – Cromwell’s extended household for example – were as vivid and lively as the statesmen – the Cromwells and Wolseys, Katherines and Henrys and the oh-so-many Thomases – often undercutting the “shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities” with simple practical knowledge such as knowing that a certain emerald ring was being crafted when the emerald shattered.

In fact, Liz Wykys, Cromwell’s wife, was a stand out character for me from the first moment we met her, greeting her travel worn husband returning from Yorkshire with

Lizzie is still up. When she hears the servants let him in, she comes out with his little dog under her arm, fighting and squealing. ‘Forget where you lived?’ He sighs…. ‘You’re sweeter to look at than the cardinal,’ he says. ‘That’s the smallest compliment a woman ever received.’ ‘And I’ve been working on it all the way from Yorkshire.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ah well!’

For all Cromwell’s wit and wisdom, experience and cunning, Liz served as a wonderful foil able to hold her own in conversation and in the reader’s imagination. Indeed, it is in Cromwell’s household that I found the heart of the novel. In his love for Liz and his children, his care and concern for the young men he adopts into his household – Rafe Sadler, Richard Williams, Christophe – was wonderful. The scents and tastes and sounds – the vividness of that household were exceptionally crafted, and the relationships between them were so tender, rendered often in a combination of naturalistic dialogue and Cromwell’s internal thoughts. One example from Anne, his daughter goes

‘May I choose my husband?’ ‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point. ‘Then I choose Rafe.’ For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend.

And Cromwell’s pain in the death of his wife and children is extraordinary – captured in simple brutal language without a hint of sentimentality and all the more tragic for that

He remembers the morning: the damp sheets, her damp forehead. Liz, he thinks, didn’t you fight? If I had seen your death coming, I would have taken him and beaten in his death’s head; I would have crucified him against the wall.

The political progress of the novel is, of course, familiar: we pick up Henry VIII’s reign as he – like a good Catholic – is seeking dispensation from the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she had in fact consummated her first marriage with Henry’s brother Arthur. And we all know the story of his infatuation with Anne Boleyn which lies behind it. And Anne in this book is a crafty and cunning young woman, both mercurial and calculating.

The difficulty with such familiar historical matter is that it can rob it of tension – we know who survives and who falls to the plotting – and it can rob it of structure. For me, that first problem was not an issue in the least, but the second was a little. It felt as if Mantel may have been struggling to find the right place to end the novel: Wolsey’s downfall? The King’s marriage? Boleyn’s coronation? The decision to close with Thomas More’s execution for me was not a big enough moment: neither the friendship between More and Cromwell, nor the tensions between them quite warranted the narrative weight given to More’s death. It was, after all, just one in a long succession of them.

What I Liked

The characterisation was exquisite at all levels within the book – a genuine masterclass in character building with not a word wasted or out of place. There are too many favourite characters in here: obviously Cromwell but also Wolsey, Liz Cromwell,
The family at Austen Friars was wonderful and warm, loving despite their terrible losses and tragedies which genuinely moved me to tears, especially the deaths of Anne and Grace.
The dialogue was nuanced, playful and utterly authentic – thankfully without any attempt to great faux Early Modern English dialect
Mantel’s historical research was simultaneously incredibly deep but lightly worn, guiding the language and imagery and sensory details in a wonderfully delicate way.
Mantel’s language was simply sublime throughout

What Could Have Been Different

Structurally, the novel felt a little episodic at times, but then so is history! I felt that the second novel in the series, Bring Up The Bodies benefitted from a sharper narrative focus: the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Thomas More lacked the presence for me to really carry the final sections of the novel – he was neither heroic and likeable enough, nor beastly enough but a combination of both, which sums up us all at the end of the day, doesn’t it? His death carried pathos but not much weight for me.

Characters:

Plot / Pace:

Worldbuilding:

Page Count: 674 pages

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Date: 4th March 2010

Available: Amazon , Fourth Estate

Published by The Book Lover's Sanctuary

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[an overview of the reviews and critical reactions]

general information | review summaries | links | about the author






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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 -


Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
	A	25/5/2009	Julie Myerson
	.	2/5/2009	Christopher Tayler
	.	8/5/2009	Marianne Brace
London Rev. of Books	.	30/4/2009	Colin Burrow
	A	8/10/2009	Ross King
	.	21/5/2009	Rachel Aspden
	A+	5/11/2009	Stephen Greenblatt
The NY Times	.	5/10/2009	Janet Maslin
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	1/11/2009	Christopher Benfey
	.	19/10/2009	Joan Acocella
	A	6/12/2009	Joan Frank
	.	3/5/2009	Stuart Kelly
	A+	13/5/2009	Anne Chisholm
	B+	3/5/2009	Andrew Holgate
	A	28/4/2009	Lucy Hughes-Hallett
	.	1/5/2009	Claudia FitzHerbert
	A+	25/4/2009	Vanora Bennett
	.	15/5/2009	Michael Caines
	A	10/10/2009	Martin Rubin
	A	6/10/2009	Wendy Smith

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.

Literature & Fiction
Genre Fiction

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Wolf Hall Paperback – August 31, 2010

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 ).

Book 1 of 3 The Wolf Hall Trilogy
Print length 604 pages
Language English
Publisher Picador
Publication date August 31, 2010
Dimensions 5.59 x 1.11 x 8.28 inches
ISBN-10 0312429983
ISBN-13 978-0312429980
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“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 “Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall . . . . Magnificent.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love " Wolf Hall , Hilary Mantel’s epic fictionalized look at Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power, came out in 2009, but I was a little busy back then, so I missed it. Still great today."―Barack Obama “On the origins of this once-world-shaking combat, with its still-vivid acerbity and cruelty, Hilary Mantel has written a historical novel of quite astonishing power. . . . With breathtaking subtlety--one quite ceases to notice the way in which she takes on the most intimate male habits of thought and speech--Mantel gives us a Henry who is sexually pathetic, and who needs a very down-to-earth counselor. . . . The means by which Mantel grounds and anchors her action so convincingly in the time she describes, while drawing so easily upon the past and hinting so indirectly at the future, put her in the very first rank of historical novelists. . . . Wolf Hall is a magnificent service to the language and literature whose early emancipation it depicts and also, in its demystifying of one of history's wickedest men, a service to the justice that Josephine Tey first demanded in The Daughter of Time.” ― Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic “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 “A huge book, in its range, ambition . . . in its success. [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 “Dazzling . . . .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 . . . . both spellbinding and believable.” ― Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review “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 “Darkly magnificent . . . Instead of bringing the past to us, her 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 “Arch, elegant, richly detailed . . . [ Wolf Hall '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 . . . Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel's slyly malicious turns of phrase . . . succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters talking.” ― Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Brilliant . . . A provocative, beautifully written book that ends much too soon.” ― The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) “The essential Mantel element . . . is a style--of writing and of thinking--that combines steely-eyed intelligence with intense yet wide-ranging sympathy. This style implies enormous respect for her readers, as if she believes that we are as intelligent and empathetic as she is, and one of the acute pleasures of reading her books is that we sometimes find ourselves living up to those expectations. . . . If you are anything like me, you will finish Wolf Hall wishing it were twice as long as its 560 pages. Torn away from this sixteenth-century world, in which you have come to know the engaging, pragmatic Cromwell as if he were your own brother--as if he were yourself--you will turn to the Internet to find out more about him . . . But none of this, however instructive will make up for your feeling of loss, because none of this additional material will come clothed in the seductive, inimitable language of Mantel's great fiction.” ― Wendy Lesser, Bookforum “Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall , a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell . . . Mantel's crystalline style, piercing eye and interest in, shall we say, the darker side of human nature, together with a real respect for historical accuracy, make this novel an engrossing, enveloping read.” ― BookPage “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 “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 “Inspired . . . 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 (four stars, People Pick) “A deft, original, but complicated novel. Fans of historical fiction--or great writing--should howl with delight.” ― USA Today “[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 “This masterwork is full of gems for the careful reader. The recurring details alone . . . shine through like some kind of Everyman's poetry. Plainspoken and occasionally brutal, Wolf Hall is both as complex and as powerful as its subject, as messy as life itself.” ― Clea Simon, The Boston Phoenix “Reader, you're in excellent hands with Hilary Mantel . . . for this thrumming, thrilling read. . . . Part of the delight of masterfully paced Wolf Hall is how utterly modern it feels. It is political intrigue pulsing with energy and peopled by historical figures who have never seemed more alive--and more human.” ― Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald “ Wolf Hall is a solid historical novel that's also a compelling read . . . Mantel's narrative manages to be both rich and lean: there's plenty of detail, but it's not piled in endless paragraphs. The plot flows swiftly from one development to the next.” ― David Loftus, The Oregonian “[Mantel] seamlessly blends fiction and history and creates a stunning story of Tudor England . . . . With its excellent plotting and riveting dialogue, Wolf Hall is a gem of a novel that is both accurate and gripping.” ― Cody Corliss, St. Louis Post-Dispatch “[A] spirited novel . . . . Mantel has a solid grasp of court politics and a knack for sharp, cutting dialogue.” ― Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly “This is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama‚There will be few novels this year as good as this one.” ― Library Journal, starred review “Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players.” ― Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Across the Narrow Sea

PUTNEY, 1500

So now get up."

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

Blood from the gash on his head--which was his father's first effort--is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father's boot is unraveling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.

"So now get up!" Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. "What are you, an eel?" his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace, and aims another kick.

It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. I'll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.

"Look now, look now," Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he's dancing. "Look what I've done. Burst my boot, kicking your head."

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don't provoke him. His nose is clotted with blood and he has to open his mouth to breathe. His father's momentary distraction at the loss of his good boot allows him the leisure to vomit. "That's right," Walter yells. "Spew everywhere." Spew everywhere, on my good cobbles. "Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet."

Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean? His head turns sideways, his hair rests in his own vomit, the dog barks, Walter roars, and bells peal out across the water. He feels a sensation of movement, as if the filthy ground has become the Thames. It gives and sways beneath him; he lets out his breath, one great final gasp. You've done it this time, a voice tells Walter. But he closes his ears, or God closes them for him. He is pulled downstream, on a deep black tide.

The next thing he knows, it is almost noon, and he is propped in the doorway of Pegasus the Flying Horse. His sister Kat is coming from the kitchen with a rack of hot pies in her hands. When she sees him she almost drops them. Her mouth opens in astonishment. "Look at you!"

"Kat, don't shout, it hurts me."

She bawls for her husband: "Morgan Williams!" She rotates on the spot, eyes wild, face flushed from the oven's heat. "Take this tray, body of God, where are you all?"

He is shivering from head to foot, exactly like Bella did when she fell off the boat that time.

A girl runs in. "The master's gone to town."

"I know that, fool." The sight of her brother had panicked the knowledge out of her. She thrusts the tray at the girl. "If you leave them where the cats can get at them, I'll box your ears till you see stars." Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent prayer. "Fighting again, or was it your father?"

Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop gouts of blood: yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a cloth, for the devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter his servant. "Sit down before you fall down." He tries to explain that he has just got up. Out of the yard. It could be an hour ago, it could even be a day, and for all he knows, today might be tomorrow; except that if he had lain there for a day, surely either Walter would have come and killed him, for being in the way, or his wounds would have clotted a bit, and by now he would be hurting all over and almost too stiff to move; from deep experience of Walter's fists and boots, he knows that the second day can be worse than the first. "Sit. Don't talk," Kat says.

When the basin comes, she stands over him and works away, dabbing at his closed eye, working in small circles round and round at his hairline. Her breathing is ragged and her free hand rests on his shoulder. She swears under her breath, and sometimes she cries, and rubs the back of his neck, whispering, "There, hush, there," as if it were he who were crying, though he isn't. He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.

When Morgan Williams comes in, he is wearing his good town coat. He looks Welsh and pugnacious; it's clear he's heard the news. He stands by Kat, staring down, temporarily out of words; till he says, "See!" He makes a fist, and jerks it three times in the air. "That!" he says. "That's what he'd get. Walter. That's what he'd get. From me."

"Just stand back," Kat advises. "You don't want bits of Thomas on your London jacket."

No more does he. He backs off. "I wouldn't care, but look at you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight."

"It never is a fair fight," Kat says. "He comes up behind you, right, Thomas? With something in his hand."

"Looks like a glass bottle, in this case," Morgan Williams says. "Was it a bottle?"

He shakes his head. His nose bleeds again.

"Don't do that, brother," Kat says. It's all over her hand; she wipes the blood clots down herself. What a mess, on her apron; he might as well have put his head there after all.

"I don't suppose you saw?" Morgan says. "What he was wielding, exactly?"

"That's the value," says Kat, "of an approach from behind--you sorry loss to the magistrates' bench. Listen, Morgan, shall I tell you about my father? He'll pick up whatever's to hand. Which is sometimes a bottle, true. I've seen him do it to my mother. Even our little Bet, I've seen him hit her over the head. Also I've not seen him do it, which was worse, and that was because it was me about to be felled."

"I wonder what I've married into," Morgan Williams says.

But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder. The boy doesn't listen to him; he thinks, if my father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed her? No, surely he'd have been taken up for it; Putney's lawless, but you don't get away with murder. Kat's what he's got for a mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.

He shuts his eyes, to make the left eye equal with the right; he tries to open both. "Kat," he says, "I have got an eye under there, have I? Because it can't see anything." Yes, yes, yes, she says, while Morgan Williams continues his interrogation of the facts; settles on a hard, moderately heavy, sharp object, but possibly not a broken bottle, otherwise Thomas would have seen its jagged edge, prior to Walter splitting his eyebrow open and aiming to blind him. He hears Morgan forming up this theory and would like to speak about the boot, the knot, the knot in the twine, but the effort of moving his mouth seems disproportionate to the reward. By and large he agrees with Morgan's conclusion; he tries to shrug, but it hurts so much, and he feels so crushed and disjointed, that he wonders if his neck is broken.

"Anyway," Kat says, "what were you doing, Tom, to set him off? He usually won't start up till after dark, if it's for no cause at all."

"Yes," Morgan Williams says, "was there a cause?"

"Yesterday. I was fighting."

"You were fighting yesterday? Who in the holy name were you fighting?"

"I don't know." The name, along with the reason, has dropped out of his head; but it feels as if, in exiting, it has removed a jagged splinter of bone from his skull. He touches his scalp, carefully. Bottle? Possible.

"Oh," Kat says, "they're always fighting. Boys. Down by the river."

"So let me be sure I have this right," Morgan says. "He comes home yesterday with his clothes torn and his knuckles skinned, and the old man says, what's this, been fighting? He waits a day, then hits him with a bottle. Then he knocks him down in the yard, kicks him all over, beats up and down his length with a plank of wood that comes to hand . . ."

"Did he do that?"

"It's all over the parish! They were lining up on the wharf to tell me, they were shouting at me before the boat tied up. Morgan Williams, listen now, your wife's father has beaten Thomas and he's crawled dying to his sister's house, they've called the priest . . . Did you call the priest?"

"Oh, you Williamses!" Kat says. "You think you're such big people around here. People are lining up to tell you things. But why is that? It's because you believe anything."

"But it's right!" Morgan yells. "As good as right! Eh? If you leave out the priest. And that he's not dead yet."

"You'll make that magistrates' bench for sure," Kat says, "with your close study of the difference between a corpse and my brother."

"When I'm a magistrate, I'll have your father in the stocks. Fine him? You can't fine him enough. What's the point of fining a person who will only go and rob or swindle monies to the same value out of some innocent who crosses his path?"

He moans: tries to do it without intruding.

"There, there, there," Kat whispers.

"I'd say the magistrates have had their bellyful," Morgan says. "If he's not watering his ale he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's assaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world."

"Finished?" Kat says. She turns back to him. "Tom, you'd better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say? He'll be good to do the heavy work, when he's healed up. He can do the figures for you, he can add and . . . what's the other thing? All right, don't laugh at me, how much time do you think I had for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my name, it's because Tom here taught me."

"He won't," he says, "like it." He can only manage like this: short, simple, declarative sentences.

"Like? He should be ashamed," Morgan says.

Kat says, "Shame was left out when God made my dad."

He says, "Because. Just a mile away. He can easily."

"Come after you? Just let him." Morgan demonstrates his fist again: his little nervy Welsh punch.

After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind is, what am I going to do, I can't stay in Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it wasn't him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What is clear is his thought about Walter: I've had enough of this. If he gets after me again I'm going to kill him, and if I kill him they'll hang me, and if they're going to hang me I want a better reason.

Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can't pick out every word. Morgan says he's burned his boats. Kat is repenting of her first offer, a post as pot-boy, general factotum and chucker-out; because, Morgan's saying, "Walter will always be coming round here, won't he? And 'Where's Tom, send him home, who paid the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you're reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt.' "

He comes downstairs. Morgan says cheerily, "You're looking well, considering."

The truth is about Morgan Williams--and he doesn't like him any the less for it--the truth is, this idea he has that one day he'll beat up his father-in-law, it's solely in his mind. In fact, he's frightened of Walter, like a good many people in Putney--and, for that matter, Mortlake and Wimbledon.

He says, "I'm on my way, then."

Kat says, "You have to stay tonight. You know the second day is the worst."

"Who's he going to hit when I'm gone?"

"Not our affair," Kat says. "Bet is married and got out of it, thank God."

Morgan Williams says, "If Walter was my father, I tell you, I'd take to the road." He waits. "As it happens, we've gathered some ready money."

"I'll pay you back."

Morgan says, laughing, relieved, "And how will you do that, Tom?"

He doesn't know. Breathing is difficult, but that doesn't mean anything, it's only because of the clotting inside his nose. It doesn't seem to be broken; he touches it, speculatively, and Kat says, careful, this is a clean apron. She's smiling a pained smile, she doesn't want him to go, and yet she's not going to contradict Morgan Williams, is she? The Williamses are big people, in Putney, in Wimbledon. Morgan dotes on her; he reminds her she's got girls to do the baking and mind the brewing, why doesn't she sit upstairs sewing like a lady, and praying for his success when he goes off to London to do a few deals in his town coat? Twice a day she could sweep through the Pegasus in a good dress and set in order anything that's wrong: that's his idea. And though as far as he can see she works as hard as ever she did when she was a child, he can see how she might like it, that Morgan would exhort her to sit down and be a lady.

"I'll pay you back," he says. "I might go and be a soldier. I could send you a fraction of my pay and I might get loot."

Morgan says, "But there isn't a war."

"There'll be one somewhere," Kat says.

"Or I could be a ship's boy. But, you know, Bella--do you think I should go back for her? She was screaming. He had her shut up."

"So she wouldn't nip his toes?" Morgan says. He's satirical about Bella.

"I'd like her to come away with me."

"I've heard of a ship's cat. Not of a ship's dog."

"She's very small."

"She'll not pass for a cat." Morgan laughs. "Anyway, you're too big all round for a ship's boy. They have to run up the rigging like little monkeys--have you ever seen a monkey, Tom? Soldier is more like it. Be honest, like father like son--you weren't last in line when God gave out fists."

"Right," Kat said. "Shall we see if we understand this? One day my brother Tom goes out fighting. As punishment, his father creeps up behind and hits him with a whatever, but heavy, and probably sharp, and then, when he falls down, almost takes out his eye, exerts himself to kick in his ribs, beats him with a plank of wood that stands ready to hand, knocks in his face so that if I were not his own sister I'd barely recognize him: and my husband says, the answer to this, Thomas, is go for a soldier, go and find somebody you don't know, take out his eye and kick in his ribs, actually kill him, I suppose, and get paid for it."

"May as well," Morgan says, "as go fighting by the river, without profit to anybody. Look at him--if it were up to me, I'd have a war just to employ him."

Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink, chink, with enticing slowness.

He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold.

"Listen," Kat says, "we grew up here, there's probably people that would help Tom out--"

Morgan gives her a look: which says, eloquently, do you mean there are a lot of people would like to be on the wrong side of Walter Cromwell? Have him breaking their doors down? And she says, as if hearing his thought out loud, "No. Maybe. Maybe, Tom, it would be for the best, do you think?"

He stands up. She says, "Morgan, look at him, he shouldn't go tonight."

"I should. An hour from now he'll have had a skinful and he'll be back. He'd set the place on fire if he thought I were in it."

Morgan says, "Have you got what you need for the road?"

He wants to turn to Kat and say, no.

But she's turned her face away and she's crying. She's not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn't cut him out that way. She's crying for her idea of what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other's children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover, nice timely information, favor-for-favor, little sweeteners, little retainers, my attorney says . . . That's what it should be like, married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big family in Putney . . . But somehow it's not been like that. Walter has spoiled it all.

Carefully, stiffly, he straightens up. Every part of him hurts now. Not as badly as it will hurt tomorrow; on the third day the bruises come out and you have to start answering people's questions about why you've got them. By then he will be far from here, and presumably no one will hold him to account, because no one will know him or care. They'll think it's usual for him to have his face beaten in.

He picks up the money. He says, " Hwyl , Morgan Williams. Diolch am yr arian ." Thank you for the money. "Gofalwch am Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busnes. Wela i chi eto rhywbryd. Poblwc."

Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again sometime.

Morgan Williams stares.

He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn't split his face open. All those days he'd spent hanging around the Williamses' households: did they think he'd just come for his dinner?

"Poblwc," Morgan says slowly. Good luck.

He says, "If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?"

"Where are you trying to get?"

"To the sea."

For a moment, Morgan Williams looks sorry it has come to this. He says, "You'll be all right, Tom? I tell you, if Bella comes looking for you, I won't send her home hungry. Kat will give her a pie."

He has to make the money last. He could work his way downriver; but he is afraid that if he is seen, Walter will catch him, through his contacts and his friends, those kinds of men who will do anything for a drink. What he thinks of, first, is slipping on to one of the smugglers' ships that go out of Barking, Tilbury. But then he thinks, France is where they have wars. A few people he talks to--he talks to strangers very easily--are of the same belief. Dover then. He gets on the road.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. And then horses, he's always been around horses, frightened horses too, because when in the morning Walter wasn't sleeping off the effects of the strong brew he kept for himself and his friends, he would turn to his second trade, farrier and blacksmith; and whether it was his sour breath, or his loud voice, or his general way of going on, even horses that were good to shoe would start to shake their heads and back away from the heat. Their hooves gripped in Walter's hands, they'd tremble; it was his job to hold their heads and talk to them, rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how Walter will soon be over.

He doesn't eat for a day or so; it hurts too much. But by the time he reaches Dover the big gash on his scalp has closed, and the tender parts inside, he trusts, have mended themselves: kidneys, lungs and heart.

He knows by the way people look at him that his face is still bruised. Morgan Williams had done an inventory of him before he left: teeth (miraculously) still in his head, and two eyes, miraculously seeing. Two arms, two legs: what more do you want?

He walks around the docks saying to people, do you know where there's a war just now?

Each man he asks stares at his face, steps back and says, "You tell me!"

They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure.

Surprisingly, he finds he will leave Dover richer than he arrived. He'd watched a man doing the three-card trick, and when he learned it he set up for himself. Because he's a boy, people stop to have a go. It's their loss.

He adds up what he's got and what he's spent. Deduct a small sum for a brief grapple with a lady of the night. Not the sort of thing you could do in Putney, Wimbledon or Mortlake. Not without the Williams family getting to know, and talking about you in Welsh.

He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples of woolen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. "Please," says one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, "will you take care of these English coins for me? I find them surplus." Suddenly the clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have paid much more. When they board they say, "The boy is with us."

As they wait to cast off, they ask him his age. He says eighteen, but they laugh and say, child, you are never. He offers them fifteen, and they confer and decide that fifteen will do; they think he's younger, but they don't want to shame him. They ask what's happened to his face. There are several things he could say but he selects the truth. He doesn't want them to think he's some failed robber. They discuss it among themselves, and the one who can translate turns to him: "We are saying, the English are cruel to their children. And coldhearted. The child must stand if his father comes in the room. Always the child should say very correctly, 'my father, sir,' and 'madam, my mother.' "

He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they don't say anything stupid like, you can get another dog. He tells them about the Pegasus, and about his father's brewhouse and how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down other people's trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the common. They are interested in that; they show the woolen samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave, turning to him from time to time to include and instruct him. They don't think much of English finished cloth generally, though these samples can make them change their mind . . . He loses the thread of the conversation when they try to tell him their reasons for going to Calais, and different people they know there.

He tells them about his father's blacksmith business, and the English-speaker says, interested, can you make a horseshoe? He mimes to them what it's like, hot metal and a bad-tempered father in a small space. They laugh; they like to see him telling a story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at which one will nod, and which the other will translate. "We are three brothers. This is our street. If ever you visit our town, there is a bed and hearth and food for you."

Goodbye, he will say to them. Goodbye and good luck with your lives. Hwyl , cloth men. Golfalwch eich busnes . He is not stopping till he gets to a war.

The weather is cold but the sea is flat. Kat has given him a holy medal to wear. He has slung it around his neck with a cord. It makes a chill against the skin of his throat. He unloops it. He touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (August 31, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 604 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312429983
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312429980
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.59 x 1.11 x 8.28 inches
#128 in Renaissance Historical Fiction (Books)
#809 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
#11,691 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Hilary mantel.

Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. She is the author of fifteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have both been awarded The Man Booker Prize. The conclusion to The Wolf Hall Trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was published in 2020.

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Customers say

Customers find the historical accuracy marvelous, excellent, and plausible. They also appreciate the insight, saying it's extraordinary, original, and engaging. However, some find the plot tedious, boring, and repetitive. They say the pacing is inconsistent and frustrating. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, with some finding it witty and sharp, while others say it'll make reading challenging.

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Customers find the historical accuracy of the book marvelous, excellent, and plausible. They also describe the book as engrossing, engaging, and delightful.

"...It was a pleasure to read such thoughtful , elegant, and - at points - even inspired prose.I recommend "Wolf Hall" without reservation...." Read more

"...It has enough family drama for a Jonathan Franzen novel, power machinations to rival "The Godfather Part II" and the joyous thrust-and-parry of..." Read more

"...Nonetheless, this too is a great read , which rewards the effort needed to sort out the characters." Read more

"...Arrange your face is damn good advice. Cromwell in particular is very well done ; not only did he take on a personality beyond any depiction I have..." Read more

Customers find the book's insight extraordinary, revealing, and engaging. They appreciate the author's diligent and knowledgeable assessment. Readers also mention the book is detailed and masterful.

"...Mantel's Cromwell is a man of astute observation and deep intuition , a man of passion he rarely lets show lest one dance step too far carry him off..." Read more

"...Far from it. "Wolf Hall" is a book that's very much alive, rich in philosophy , robust in its humor...." Read more

"...He is intelligent, self-educated , worldly, and acts always in perfect compliance with required social forms...." Read more

"...The book had huge potential and is overall a good read with great characters and wonderful bits of wisdom and history...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality. Some mention the prose is witty, sharp, and navigable. They also say the book is written in an intimate, immediate third person. However, others find the narration somewhat difficult to follow and the frequent "he" speakers make the reading challenging and disruptive. They say the dialogue is too much and the book can get confusing.

"...It was a pleasure to read such thoughtful, elegant , and - at points - even inspired prose.I recommend "Wolf Hall" without reservation...." Read more

"...It lent an aura of confusion and ambiguity to the entire book. For example:"Old Wykys was queasy when they put out to see...." Read more

"...This is dramatic irony at its most potent : Cromwell imagines a vacation from statesmanship in the company of Jane Seymour, but we know, and Mantel..." Read more

"...I will, however, concede that it can get a bit confusing since most people had the same name..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development in the book. Some mention the characters come to life, the complexity unfolds, and the cast is colorful. However, others say the characters are unmemorable and uninspired.

"...the usual cast of heroes and grotesques, but rather profoundly three-dimensional characters ...." Read more

"...Also hard to follow the characters ; who was who." Read more

"...novel that turned historical figures into interesting and plausible characters ...." Read more

Customers find the plot difficult to follow. They say the book is tedious, boring, and repetitive. Readers also say the story is plodding and overly long. They mention the book has no resolution and is hard to keep track of.

"...at being atmospheric or deep, but instead it continually pulls the reader out of the story ...." Read more

"...Cromwell as "he" and "him" through 600 pages to be both confusing and tiresome ...." Read more

"...This is very useful, but even so it can be hard to keep track ...." Read more

"...It is wry, insightful, sad, sophisticated , enjoyable, and immensely thought-provoking...." Read more

Customers find the book difficult to read. They mention the pacing of the writing is inconsistent and the story is extremely slow moving. Readers also mention the delivery is disappointing and repetitive.

"..."Wolf Hall" can therefore be a difficult read at points , and does command the reader's full attention...." Read more

"...It slowed down my reading of the book , so it took a lot longer to get through than is usually my experience...." Read more

"...What I got was something quieter, slower , and immensely more satisfying: I got to spend time with Thomas Cromwell, the most compelling character I..." Read more

"The binding is too close and the print is a bit light . I don't know the publishing business but I..." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book less than compelling, dull, and distracting. They say the story has absolutely no momentum and requires a great deal of concentration. Readers also mention the book drags on and on.

"...But it is flawed, deeply I think, by what is an unnecessary stylistic device ...." Read more

"...where my praise dries up - for all its merits, Wolf Hall became a rather dull slog for me...." Read more

"...But the approach is jarring and unnecessarily distracting ...." Read more

"...Cromwell the man is a brilliant and astute observer, lawyerly and detached while suffering increasing pangs of conscience as his familial..." Read more

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First Published:
Oct 13, 2009, 560 pages
Sep 2010, 592 pages

Historical Fiction
UK (Britain) & Ireland
17th Century or Earlier
Top Books of 2009
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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – review

T homas Cromwell, the chief minister to Henry VIII who oversaw the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, was widely hated in his lifetime, and he makes a surprising fictional hero now. Geoffrey Elton used to argue that he founded modern government, but later historians have pared back his role, and one recent biographer, Robert Hutchinson, portrayed him as a corrupt proto-Stalinist. He's a sideshow to Wolsey in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, a villain who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Law and financial administration - his main activities - don't always ignite writers' imaginations, and in the pop-Foucauldian worldview of much historical fiction since the 1980s, his bureaucratic innovations would be seen as inherently sinister. Then there's the portrait of him, after Holbein: a dewlapped man in dark robes with a shrewd, unfriendly face, holding a folded paper like an upturned dagger. He looks, as Hilary Mantel has him say in her new novel, "like a murderer".

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. Taking off from the scant evidence concerning his early life, she imagines a miserable childhood for him as the son of a violent, drunken blacksmith in Putney. Already displaying toughness, intelligence and a gift for languages, he runs away to the continent as a boy of 15 or so (his date of birth isn't known, and in the novel he doesn't know it himself). At this point, only 16 pages in, the action cuts to 1527, with Cromwell back in England, "a little over forty years old" and a trusted agent of Cardinal Wolsey. His life-shaping experiences in France, Italy and the Netherlands are dealt with in flashback here and there: he has been a soldier, a trader and an accountant for a Florentine bank; he has killed a man and learned to appreciate Italian painting.

Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

The first half of the novel, built around Wolsey's fall from power, details Cromwell's domestic setup at Austin Friars and introduces the major players in Tudor politics. Without clobbering the reader with the weight of her research, Mantel works up a 16th-century world in which only a joker would call for cherries in April or lettuce in December, and where hearing an unlicensed preacher is an illicit thrill on a par with risking syphilis. The civil wars that brought the Tudors to the throne still make older people shudder, bringing Henry's obsession with producing a male heir into focus. And the precarious nature of early modern life is brought home by the abrupt deaths of Cromwell's wife and daughters, carried off by successive epidemics in moving but unsentimentally staged scenes. Cromwell asks if he can bury his elder daughter with a copybook she's written her name in; "the priest says he has never heard of such a thing".

Grieving, he thinks of Tyndale's banned English Bible: "now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love." More, he knows, thinks "love" is "a wicked mistranslation. He insists on 'charity' . . . He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you." In the second half of the novel - which charts Cromwell's rise to favour as he clears the way for the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn - More emerges as Cromwell's opposite number, more a spokesman for another worldview than a practical antagonist. Shabbily dressed, genial, yet punctiliously correct on politically controversial points, this More is a far cry from Bolt's gentle humanist martyr. He's made repulsive even more by the self-adoring theatricality behind his modest exterior than by his interest in torturing heretics and contemptuous treatment of his wife. He ends up stage-managing his own destruction out of narcissism and fanaticism, or at best a cold idealism that's contrasted unfavourably with Cromwell's reforming worldliness.

For all its structural and thematic importance, however, Cromwell's conflict with More is only part of a wider battle caused by Henry's desire to have his first marriage annulled. Much space is given over to court politics, which Mantel manages to make comprehensible without downplaying its considerable complexity. Central figures - the Boleyn sisters, Catherine of Aragon, the young Mary Tudor, the king himself - are brought plausibly to life, as are Cromwell's wife, Liz Wykys, and Cardinal Wolsey. Determined, controlled but occasionally impulsive, and a talented hater, Mantel's Anne Boleyn is a more formidable character even than her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, portrayed here as a scheming old warhorse who rattles a bit when he moves on account of all the relics and holy medals concealed about his person.

Making characters of all these people is, of course, a big risk. 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. Small rises in the level of language are frequently used for comic effect, as in: "Well, I tell you, Lady Shelton, if she had had an axe to hand, she would have essayed to cut off my head." The effortless-seeming management of contrasting registers plays a big part in the novel's success, as does Mantel's decision to let Cromwell have a sense of humour.

"Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year." If not a man for all seasons, the book's heroic accountant is surely the man for his season. Mantel keeps too close an eye on facts and emotions to make her story an arch allegory of modern Britain's origins, but her setting of such unglamorous virtues as financial transparency and legal clarity against the forces of reaction and mystification is interesting and mildly provocative. At the same time, sinister grace notes accompany Cromwell's triumph. Wolf Hall, the Seymour family seat, is a site of scandal in the novel, a place where men prey on women and the old on the young. It's also where Jane Seymour first caught Henry's eye - an event that falls just outside the book's time scheme, but which serves as a reminder that, whatever their status in 1535, most of the major characters will end up with their heads on the block.

Mantel is a prolific, protean figure who doesn't fit into many of the established pigeonholes for women writers, and whose output ranges from the French revolution (A Place of Greater Safety) to her own troubled childhood (Giving Up the Ghost). Maybe this book will win one of the prizes that have been withheld so far. A historian might wonder about the extent to which she makes Cromwell a modern rationalist in Renaissance dress; a critic might wonder if the narrator's awe at the central character doesn't sometimes make him seem as self-mythologising as his enemies. But Wolf Hall succeeds on its own terms and then some, both as a non-frothy historical novel and as a display of Mantel's extraordinary talent. 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. A sequel is apparently in the works, and it's not the least of Mantel's achievements that the reader finishes this 650-page book wanting more.

Hilary Mantel
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Review: 'Wolf Hall,' by Hilary Mantel
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 ...
Book Review
In "Wolf Hall" it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the "quaking world" aright. "Utopia ...
WOLF HALL
The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction. Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor. 5. Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009. ISBN: 978--8050-8068-1.
Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1) by Hilary Mantel
3.91. 215,045 ratings19,894 reviews. This is an alternative cover edition for ISBN 9780007230181. 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.
Book Review
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 ...
REVIEW: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
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 ...
'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel, a Biographical Novel on Thomas Cromwell
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 ...
Book Review: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with ...
Book Review: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall was one of the first audio books I purchased… and it was - and remains - gorgeous! But I had listened to it some years ago. Back in 2010 to be precise, before this blog existed! And it is a novel I have cited on occasion on various other posts over the years which felt weird without a review to link it to.
Book Marks reviews of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
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. Ms. Mantel takes an extremely contemporary approach to Cromwell by appreciating his toughness, his keen political instincts, his financial acumen and his intimate knowledge of the workings ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: Summary and reviews
In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's arch, elegant, richly detailed biographical novel centered on Cromwell…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.
Wolf Hall
6/10/2009. Wendy Smith. 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.
Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall is a 2009 historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire.Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More.
Hilary Mantel: How I came to write Wolf Hall
In this extract from her final book, A Memoir of My Former Self, the two-time Booker Prize winner explains how she wanted to create a sense of history listening and talking to itself, and reveals her relish for Thomas Cromwell's company. 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for Wolf Hall I was about 30 years late.
Book Review: Wolf Hall
The thing that makes Wolf Hall such an enjoyable read is Mantel's writing style. She brings 16th century England alive with her vivid descriptions of landscapes and characters throughout the book. If you aren't well-versed in 16 th century history and find them dull, this book will make it more interesting. Mantel's ability to create ...
Wolf Hall: Mantel, Hilary: 9780312429980: Amazon.com: Books
Wolf Hall. Paperback - August 31, 2010. by Hilary Mantel (Author) 4.2 20,907 ratings. Book 1 of 3: The Wolf Hall Trilogy. Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction. See all formats and editions. National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner, 2009. WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE.
What do readers think of Wolf Hall?
I enjoyed the challenging writing style as well as the story of Cromwell--and it really is Cromwell's story, not so much as a stream-of-consciousness but as a stream-of-life. It's a book to be savored--many times. Canadian Chickadee. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I found this book exasperating in the extreme.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel book review
Henry VIII had six wives and at least as many Thomases: Wolsey, More, Cranmer, Cromwell, Howard (Third Duke of Norfolk), Wriothesley (pronounced "Risley",
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The Wolf Hall Trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies a…
Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award.She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: book review
Buy Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate) from the Telegraph Bookshop. This review was originally published in April 2009. Wolf Hall went on to win both the Man Booker Prize and the National ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall. by Hilary Mantel. Publication Date: August 31, 2010. Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction. Paperback: 604 pages. Publisher: Picador. ISBN-10: 0312429983. ISBN-13: 9780312429980. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy.
Thomas Cromwell Series by Hilary Mantel
New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy is the magnificent, riveting historical saga of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, featuring Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Jane Seymour, and other political and royal players from Tudor England. The Man Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the…

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Sunday Book Review

Renaissance Men

Illustration by Esther Pearl Watson

Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize (October 7, 2009)

A version of this review appears in print on November 1, 2009, on page BR 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Renaissance Men.

REVIEW: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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