Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I have long been fascinated by the Tudors. I've always loved history, and the further back you go the fewer famous women are to be found, but Elizabeth I stands out regardless. She is captivating for many reasons, but the England that came before her was perhaps even more rife with intrigue than the one she inherited. Though I've read much about Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, and all of Shakespeare's Henry plays, I had not read much about the Tudor Henries. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, proved an excellent place to start. The synopsis reads:

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 oppose 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).

It is impossible to read Wolf Hall without knowing that it's all doomed: the reader knows that Henry will marry Anne Boleyn; knows that she and Cromwell will ultimately meet the same fate, both beheaded on Henry's orders. But before these defeats there will be glittering triumphs as they indelibly shape the England, and indeed the world, that we know today. Hilary Mantel takes this England on a precipice and gives us a book that feels marvelously modern in its tensions and its machinations.  The details may be historical, but the emotions and concerns are timeless - this is not primarily an historical novel, it is primarily an interesting one. 

Her Thomas Cromwell is, quite unlike the Major of Troubles, wonderfully intriguing. He has come from nothing, risen to a position of tenuous power as he navigates an England in which his sponsor's place is rapidly declining, and tries to come through unscathed. His past is murky, and comes to the reader in bits and pieces. He has been abroad, has been a hired soldier, has learned several businesses and a score of languages; he knows when to be polished but hasn't quite lost the rough edges, though he seems to know how to use them to his advantage. He is good with people and kind with many, gathering about him a warm, haphazard household. But he is not a man to be taken lightly and not incapable of danger. Here is a profoundly round character with depths both seen and unseen, a man constantly surrounded by others but deeply alone.

In addition to a compelling story and a deeply fascinating protagonist, Mantel has written an incredibly well-styled novel. Her skill is certainly deserving of the Man Booker Prize she received for the book in 2009; her sentences are rich and complex, the kind of writing you can fall into with relish.
Half her dialogue lies outside quotation marks in the narration, along with her Cromwell's inner thoughts, the frequent use of free indirect style telling us so much more about this Cromwell than any history book. When he sees his wife's body after her sudden death:

The room - which this morning was only their bedroom - is lively with the scent of the herbs they are burning against contagion. They have lit candles at her head and feet. They have bound up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself. She looks like the dead; she looks fearless, and as if she could judge you; she looks flatter and deader than people he has seen on battlefields, with their guts spilled.

The layers in the aside alone are enough to make you catch: it was only this morning the room was fine; it was only a bedroom but now it is forever something else. This room, where his wife has died and he has come to see her body, is lively with bright smells, with lit candles. But there she lies, flatter and deader of her sudden illness than the soldiers he has seen fallen in battle, than the soldier he has presumably cut down himself in his time as a mercenary.  Mantel's is the kind of writing that is delicious to read, the kind of writing that draws you in and will not let you go.

Wolf Hall, and Mantel's Cromwell, have a distinctive voice, and her exploration of the motives and intrigues at play are masterful - for all that they would change the face of history, the novel is fundamentally personal. We see the world only as Cromwell does, and so it is his concerns that we are privy to; the book revolves tightly around him even as Cromwell's world revolves tightly around Henry's whims. The world of the book is simultaneously domestic and expansive, private and public, and it is a pleasure to watch it unfold and puzzle out some of Cromwell's character as it goes.

This was a book that I was loathe to put down and loathe to finish, wanting there to be more of this world and this writing. Luckily, there is a sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, published last month, and even more luckily a third to come and finish out the trilogy. Though an interest in the history led me to the book, I think it would be trivial to the enjoyment of it. This was a wonderful, fascinating read, and I heartily recommend it.