Book Review - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

 
Synopsis:  In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power.

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. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, 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?

First Line:  "So now get up."

Random Quote:  "There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into your hand.  You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."

Review:  Wolf Hall, the 2009 winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a huge commitment, but the return on that investment is in a multiplicity of pleasures.  There is the language – that alone would make the book worthwhile, but Mantel is not content to settle for beautiful language; she also offers an intricate plot, rich and deeply imagined characters, and an ornate historical setting.

Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger, Frick Museum - Image via Wikipedia

At the novel’s center is Thomas Cromwell, like the spider in his web.  Like the spider Mantel’s Cromwell personifies duality, both deadly and beneficial – his ruthless pragmatism the thread that unites all the pieces of the design.

The Tudors are a perennial favorite.  Who doesn’t love Henry VIII and his women (headless or otherwise)?  Yet there are other stories to be told from the time and Cromwell is a wonderful choice.  He is in many ways a most modern gentleman – an ultra-competent lawyer and financial administrator, arguably the father of modern government.  I’ve always admired Cromwell – his practicality appeals and it certainly shines in this depiction.  I’ve never understood the fascination with Saint Thomas More, the vaunted man for all seasons (where all seasons are for burning heretics) with his unlivable Utopia.  If we must talk of government give me someone who can create order out of chaos and spin gold out of hay.  I guess I’ve always rooted for Rumpelstiltskin.   Cromwell gazes at us out of his Holbein portrait, looking “like a murderer,” surrounded by his tools of office, caught between tasks for his King.  Wolsey’s protégé, Cromwell is the man who severed England’s ties with the Catholic Church and got Henry his divorce from Katherine and wedding to Anne Boleyn.  In Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith, the English aristocracy got a taste of the rise of talent over birth.  Mantel envisions him as a radical social reformer, tallying up the wrongs, setting them right, and gathering power to him through the exercise of his prodigious skill and intellect.

This is a novel that is concerned with power of all kinds – the personal and political go hand-in-hand throughout as each illuminates the other.  The sharp contrast between Cromwell’s unwieldy, ever-growing, and above all happy family and More’s sniping at his wife and daughters make the author’s views brutally clear.  We are dropped into the very middle of the action at the novel’s beginning, with its central character being beaten to within an inch of his life by his father and crawling, inch by inch, towards safety.  It is this event and its careful, steady momentum that sets the tone for the rest of the book with Cromwell at its center moving inch by inch, ever forward into his future.

It is easy to forget that at one time publishing the Bible in a language other than Latin was radical and heretical, that to say that the bread on the altar was just that – bread, metaphorical flesh – was to speak against the word of God as delivered by his priests.  A Bible in English, printed in a book that could be mass-produced and read by anyone – this is the stuff that modernity is built on.  It’s not just about Henry’s sexual peccadilloes or about Anne Boleyn’s thirst for the crown; it’s about the birth of an Empire that is sovereign outside of the control of the Pope.  The Tudors feel familiar in part because their struggles – over sexual mores, social mobility, the role of Church and State – are our struggles.

Wolf Hall succeeds on all levels, elevating its genre above the level of bodice ripping without neglecting the sheer joy of getting to know another time and its people through an inventive author’s eyes.  It is good to sit inside Cromwell’s head, to see the world through his eyes, to walk those familiar paths behind him.  This is a novel that will make you dream, will make you think, will make you smile, even as its main character hurtles, inch by inch, towards his off-stage demise.

Reading Challenges:  Battle of the Prizes - British Version, Book Awards Reading Challenge 2010, Complete Booker 2010 Challenge, Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2010, 2010 100+ Reading Challenge, 2010 Chunkster Challenge, 2010 Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge, Typically British Reading Challenge

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