I’ve had a copy of Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bringing Up the Bodies, on my bookshelves for…probably a couple of years. I’ve tried reading it a couple of times, but just could not get into it — despite the fact that I freaking love historical fiction about the Tudor court (seriously — I devoured all of the Philippa Gregory books about it in like two weeks) and it’s SO well-reviewed. But when your book begins with the main character as a young boy getting the shit beat out of him by his father…well, that’s not the best hook for me. So I tried the audiobook, thinking I’d be forced to stick with it if it was my only option for entertainment in the car. And stick with it I did, even though it felt like a beating at times…
“But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
So, Wolf Hall tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, who’s basically…well, he’s like a fixer for King Henry VIII. His official title eventually became “chief minister”, but his real role was to use legislation (he was a lawyer) and his powerful capabilities of persuasion to get the king what he wanted — at any cost. And the primary thing that the king wanted, at least for most of the novel, was to divorce Queen Katharine (or rather, have their marriage annulled on the basis of incest — Katharine had previously been married to Henry’s dead brother for about 5 minutes — and therefore render his daughter Mary a bastard) and marry Anne Boleyn. This was, of course, A VERY BIG DEAL. King Henry wants and needs a male heir, and despite 20 years of marriage, Katharine has failed to produce one (and of course, it’s her failure). He also wants and needs Anne Boleyn in his bed, and she won’t let him unless her makes her a queen.
“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”
So Cromwell steps in to make it happen — he manipulates the House of Commons to allow Henry supremacy over the Church, he coerces Katharine and her daughter Princess Mary to back off on their claims, he shows up at the king’s request in the middle of the night to interpret his dreams for him. He pays people off, threatens their families or positions, and smooths everything over in the end. Most portrayals of Thomas Cromwell make him seem like…not a very nice man, and while he doesn’t come off as a sweetheart here either, Mantel at least makes him human, and gives us an understanding into why he does what he does.
Mantel obviously researched this book meticulously. I read somewhere that she had notecards with character’s bios and their locations at various times so that she didn’t put them somewhere in the novel that they couldn’t have been in real life. The writing is detailed and the characters are very fleshed out, especially Thomas, Anne and Henry. But I have two main complaints, both of which really made the book hard to read. First of all — everyone in this book is named Tom or Mary. No exceptions. I understand that Mantel did not name these people, but still — good lord, did this make it hard to follow. She also wrote the whole novel from Tom’s perspective, but it’s in third person. So she uses the pronoun “he” a lot, and it always took me a second to realize she meant Tom, who’s essentially the narrator.
But my biggest issue is that Mantel doesn’t try to give the reader any background for what’s happening. I’m a pretty smart person, and I’ve read a lot about this time period and the happenings at court, and I felt lost for at least 30% of this novel. She just starts a scene, lets her characters talk (and good lord, can they talk — although some of the dry wit and snarky jabs actually cracked me up), and then moves somewhere else. She either needed to back out of Tom’s head a bit to give us more of an overview (like I said, it’s written in third person limited), or give him a dumb stable boy to act as a stand in for the reader, and have tom explain the grander political scene to him as various events occur. One of my favorite things about the Outlander series is that we have Claire’s eyes to see through, and she’s learning as we do. Thomas knows everything, and without all of that knowledge for myself, I had trouble keeping up.