What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall.
That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me.
I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer those things. I had the hang of Mantel’s style and after reading CJ Sansom’s wonderful Dissolution, I was ready to continue on with the trilogy.
Now I might have to go back and read Wolf Hall again because, wow, this is genius.
The way Mantel writes Thomas Cromwell’s inner monologue as a wary but determined reformer, convinced that he is on the right side of things, willing to let Henry VIII play his sex games at the cost of lives if it means changing England for what he sees as good can almost, ALMOST, detract from the fact that this is a schemer doing terrible things at no cost beside his own ambition.
Watching Cromwell make and break alliances with all the subtlety of a snake (or a wolf on the prowl, if you will) left me enraptured even as I knew what was coming. I was heartbroken for his victims, many of whom happen to be convenient scores for Cromwell to settle, even though they too have gladly stepped over other people’s bodies (!) to get where they are.
Is that the consequence of true reform? A sort of social Darwinism where the powerful play musical chairs until the next reformation, with the losers facing the noose or guillotine?
Either way, Cromwell will soon find out.
Wolf Hall begins with one of the great opening lines ever: So now get up. Cromwell will again-and-again because he is a fighter, because a commoner doesn’t become the king’s closest advisor by being passive, because he thinks he must be a wolf to survive. We rise and we rise and we rise until we do not. If our ambition is shared with might, we will sacrifice whoever we need to in order to keep it. It’s what makes these such great political novels. Bring up the bodies, indeed.
