Like many others, I thought this book was utterly brilliant. The pleasure of reading it was palpable, a tingling in my fingers. That kind of pleasure put me in mind of another book that provoked it, Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millenium, but I thought to myself, those books are nothing like each other. Then I realized that in terms of subject matter, they are not so dissimilar after all. Both revolve largely around the search for clarification of religious marriage law, in the service of authorizing ‘unusual’ arrangements (polygamy among 10th century Jews in Yehoshua’s case, Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine and marriage to Anne, in Mantel’s). But while the topic is definitely part of the pleasure of Yehoshua’s book, it is only incidental to the pleasure of reading Wolf Hall.

No, that feeling I got in my finger tips when reading this book was coming from the buzzing energy contained in it. The book is about energy.* The energy of natural forces:

Kratzer makes some drawings. He draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal's day.

The energy of the inchoate capitalism that is forging a recognizably modern world:

The world is not run from where [Percy] thinks. Not from his border fortress, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

The energy of the emergence of religion into the vernacular, through the translation of the Bible:

As the word of God spreads, the people's eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought it was.

And most of all the energy of Thomas Cromwell, a remarkable creation (I speak of the character in the book, whatever his relation to the historical person). Cromwell more than anyone understands these sources of energy and channels them, or embodies them in his person. He never stops. He is advising the king on how to deal with the Emperor one moment, the Boleyns on how to get Anne married to the King, the next, and finally the cook on how to prepare wafers or the foreman on how best to check bricks, the next. “I have that in hand” or “I must think about doing that (something no-one has thought possible)” are his constant watchwords. And behind this amazing energy a free-floating, almost calm and detached curiosity, about places (he has traveled a lot), languages (he knows them all), people (he knows everyone), the Bible (he supports its translation into English), bolts of cloth and Turkey carpets (he has traded in them copiously), food and horticulture (“He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter’s salt cod”), and on and on.

It is hard to see, from the book alone, why Cromwell has such a bad reputation among his contemporaries. Everyone is afraid of him, even the King we learn at one point; everyone says he looks like a murderer. And yet we, thanks to a very close third-person narration that makes us privy to all his thoughts and feelings, cannot help but see him as such a sweet person, kind and caring to those who are his charges, never wanting revenge, eschewing torture (contrary to More, who makes a very satisfying villain, priggish, tyrannical, self-satisfied, obstinate, everything that the pragmatist Cromwell is not). The answer to this near paradox, I think, this dissonance between how we see Cromwell and how everyone else in the novel does, is that in understanding and embodying all the forces that are changing the world, he appears to others who do not understand them to be almost diabolically effective. (Also, it must be said, he cultivates his reputation as a thug when it suits him.) One might say that he really is fearful and murderous in the way that change and the future are always, inevitably, fearful and murderous.

A final comment on the language: Mantel’s writing in this book is stunning. It feels as if she has created a new way of writing just for it. It is mesmerizing, flowing in and out of Cromwell’s thoughts, swooping onto the smallest detail, pulling back to the widest scope, but always as restless and roving as Cromwell himself. (Many people have commented on the fact that Mantel uses “he” and its cognates for Cromwell without, in many cases, making it clear it is him that she is writing about. A single sentence can contain several male pronouns, all referring to different people, interlocking according to no rule of parsing. This can make the narrative confusing at times, but the confusion is certainly intentional on the author’s part. These confusions are like eddies around which the narrative flows, slowing the reader down and giving him/her something to chew on, to contrast with the inundating smoothness of the prose in general.)

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* ETA: After writing this I came across this quote from a piece on Mantel in The Daily Telegraph: "But when she finally came to Cromwell, she says, 'I felt the wait had paid off, because it was as though in the dark the story had been gathering power. When I wrote the first page I got such a surge of exhilaration, a charge, and I felt unstoppable. I felt such a burst of energy being lent to me by the character. And it wasn’t a book to write without a lifetime’s experience behind you. I couldn’t have thought myself into him when I was younger.’"