(2.5) Perhaps I'm too unsophisticated to handle the style, but why is this great literature?

Now that I read several of the other reviews, I see that I wasn't alone. I'm sure it was a deliberate style choice (or at least interpreted as such by the Man Booker judges), but I couldn't adjust to it. I can't even really put a label on the style (again, my literary/historical unsophisticatedness, perhaps).

As other reviews have stated, one of the most frustrating elements of the style is the ambiguity of speaker. Not only are there many, many characters, but several are often referred to by several titles or names (in dialog and in narrative alike, so it's not just for 'accuracy'). Further, there are many, many instances of egregious over-pronoun-ation. It wasn't till well into the novel that I adopted the rule to assume that any references to "he" were to Thomas Cromwell, barring any exceedingly obvious other choice. But it still felt awfully ambiguous who was speaking or being written about. I think the following is a great example of how awkward this is:

--
"That's better," Audley says. "I knew the air would do you good." He glances up, in invitation; but he, Cromwell, signals he will stay where he is, leaning by the window (p. 462)
--

It is illustrative because in most cases, Mantel would just omit the parenthetical Cromwell and leave you wondering what was going on. In this case, she found it so unclear she turned the sentence into something monstrous. I forgot the page number, but she had a very similarly structured sentence just a few pages later. I just didn't get it. The only thing I could think of was that the style may have been supposed to be in the manner of a real-time personal chronicler of Thomas Cromwell's life. Taken down at the moment and never abridged. However, I didn't perceive any clues other than the frustration at trying to follow along.

It was difficult to get beyond the style, as I spent most of my readerly effort trying to decipher the narrative and dialog, and much less than usual on plot, themes etc. (It's difficult to think on a higher level when you're constantly flipping to the list of characters and the royal family trees to identify characters...i say use the narrative to introduce them!). But getting beyond the style, I found an intriguing historical novel. I dont' know my history nearly well enough to know which is history and which is fiction. Therein may lay the 'genius', I don't know.