If you tend to read your books on the run, to and from work, on the tube or the train, then Hilary Mantel’s 650 page hardback is heavy work. But now the 2009 Man Booker prize winner is out in soft cover you no longer need a rucksack to carry it around.
So hunker down for a riveting romp through one of the most colourful episodes in British history; Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn and how he nationalised the church in England to turn it into the Church of England.
We see this through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell whose fictionalised biography Wolf Hall essentially is; from Cromwell’s early days in Putney, being beaten to a pulp by his drunken brute of a father, to the shrewd politicking which took him to the top of the Tudor tree to become Henry’s chief minister in 1532.
Mantel’s Cromwell does not wear the cloak of cruelty with which history has clothed him. He is kind to animals and the human waifs and strays invited to share his home. He is anxious to save heretics from the flames of Henry’s bonfires. The poor are fed at his gates. But when it comes to power, he is a manipulator every bit as cunning as Peter Mandelson.
There are difficulties with this book, though, and readers should be patient until they settle into Mantel’s style. The dialogue is sometimes confusing and you may be unsure who is saying what. But, when in doubt, assume it is Cromwell speaking.
Also, under Mantel’s pen, momentous events do not always seem so. But then this is deliberate. She is describing those who are making history as they are living it, so they cannot know the consequences of their actions.
Jane Seymour – who lives at Wolf Hall – flits in and out of the text like the plain and unremarkable bit part player she was until she caught Henry’s amorous eye. But the characters are not to know she will become his third queen when the story continues beyond the last page of this novel.
Cromwell’s priority, in this narrative, as with his mentor Cardinal Wolsey before him, is to give the king what he wants. Only we know the ensuing split with Rome was so seismic its aftershocks are felt to this day.
So when Anne gives birth and Henry hears the new child is not his longed for son and heir his reaction is controlled and understated and all the more believable for it. “Call her Elizabeth,” he says. “Cancel the jousts.” In one, brilliant, throwaway line we find ourselves empathising with the king in his agonising disappointment. Archbishop Cranmer offers consolation, venturing hopefully: “Perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.” And we think: if only they knew.
When Mantel gives us the pinched-faced, hard-as-a-fingernail princess Mary only we can see in her uncompromising teenage resolution the makings of the Bloody Mary she became. Mantel mixes the grand with the personal, so when Cromwell’s wife dies of fever we feel the fragility of life in Tudor times and the commonplace of death which leads to the bereaved shrugging it off and starting again with what we might consider, in our age, indecent haste.
But for anyone involved in the world of politics, it is the way Cromwell drafts legislation which fascinates. He does more than choose the exact words needed to make laws work; he also uses the psychology of words to ensure those laws will be widely accepted. Because there were always the likes of Thomas More who would never sign up; not even the certainty of execution could persuade him.
“More is now required to swear the Act of Supremacy,” we are told. “An act which draws together all the powers and dignities assumed by the king…It doesn’t, as some say, make the king head of the church. It states that he is head of the church, and always has been. If people don’t like new ideas, let them have old ones.”
Mantel gives Cromwell humanity, which makes him her hero in more than just the literary sense. He has a ready wit which left laughing out loud, and he has so much learning he can spin intellectual webs to entrap all about him. Mantel offers him to us as a Renaissance man of governance.
There is so much good about this book perhaps one shouldn’t nit-pick. But while the language and events ring true to their time, I would have liked a little more contemporary atmosphere, conjured up so well by CJ Sansom writing of the same period in his Shardlake novels. When Mantel’s characters walk the streets or sit down at table we know what they are thinking. When Sansom’s creations step outside or eat inside we are also told what they smell and taste.
That said, Wolf Hall is 24 carat literary gold.
