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Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)

Hilary Mantel

Start date: February 1, 2020

Finish date: February 29, 2020

Discussion: 2020 Historical Fict. Tournament

Discussion leader: Christopher

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What Members Thought

Jan 29, 2020 Henk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Super shocking that Hilary Mantel died 😢
Rich and engaging. Cutthroat and brutal.
Sucking you into Tudor England but requiring a lot of concentration- 4 stars
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.

General
I am not a huge fan of historical fiction. Not sure why, but if a blurb on a book starts with Super shocking that Hilary Mantel died 😢
Rich and engaging. Cutthroat and brutal.
Sucking you into Tudor England but requiring a lot of concentration- 4 stars
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.

General
I am not a huge fan of historical fiction. Not sure why, but if a blurb on a book starts with "1876, Wyoming" than the lights just go off for me.
Wolf Hall is however exceptionally good and surpasses the bounds and innate dislike I have for the genre. Still I found the reading experience not really smooth and noted that I didn't progress easily in this book without really blocking time for it and giving it my full attention.

The style Hilary Mantel uses to bring the rise of Thomas Cromwell to live, as if the reader is watching over his shoulder, is part of the reason for this. Cromwell is often referred to by he in meetings or conversations and the number of people with first name Thomas is just enormous and adds to the confusion.

The story itself is high octane, Greek drama like. We have beheadings, heresy burnings, deadly fevers and incestuous (or at least unsavoury) relations around the court.
Despite Cromwell thinking The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on. a lot is left unsaid as puzzles to figure out by the reader.
At times the meetings Cromwell needs to discuss something with Henry strangely enough reminded me of conference calls of the modern day age. I think a take over battle around a major multinational would not be a strange approach to adopting this books setting to the modern world.

Wolf Hall in my view is not an accessible read in that sense. The pay off is however impressive.

Characters: Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn and Thomas More
How does Cromwell transform from a low life to the mightiest cardinal secretary and a lawyer? I miss some kind of background on this upward social mobility, even though his talents as someone who always gets his way, one way or the other, are made clear by Mantel.

I feel we get little glimpses in what motivates him and how he feels. We have tragedy, caused by rampant illnesses and death, recurring every summer, and a touching scene where the clothes of his wife are cut up and recycled in new garments. We start the book of with a visceral scene of him being beaten half to death by his father (leading him to think later: I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before).
We see some glimpses of religious conviction, the story of the granny burned at the stake when he was young is one of the few times we get to see something of the inner world and the thoughts that shaped Cromwell.
And we have glints of family life but I still had a hard time understanding what made him tick and what prompted the move from the Cardinal to the King, besides power.
Him being a family man and gathering an entourage of doting, meritocratically picked youngsters is an interesting contrast, however this could also be seen from a lense of power as pointed out by one of his protegees:
When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, No, you don't, I agree, it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

Anne Boleyn as an character I did enjoy quite a lot, from the initial introductions (My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight’s daughter?” “Ah,” the cardinal says, entering into the problem. “To her face, my lady.) to her fiery vengeance to anyone opposing her (At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.).
Her reflection on finally being queen is quite touching when we think of how she ends up at the end of Bring Up the Bodies: I was always desired. But now i am valued. And that is a different thing, i find. All this is balanced out by her abuse of her sister Mary as just a pawn to get full grip on Henry.

And then we have stringent Thomas More, who already quite early says that he is unsure if one can be friends with a sovereign and falls out of the favour of Henry spectacularly due to his principles: I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.

Themes: Church versus State, Merchants versus Nobility, Laws versus the Individual, Men and Women
On a more intellectual level I only late in the book picked up on what broader themes the story is revolving around. I think it is testament to the power of the characterisation of Mantel, because the themes are major and still relevant today.

Center stage is the battle between worldly versus spiritual power and the ascending merchant class versus the established nobility. This is symbolized best by a terrifying speech of Cromwell on the power of money: Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, 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 the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be 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 extent and limit of power in the hands of one mortal, legitimised by worldly people, versus the individual's conscience and personal religious beliefs is also prominently brought into question.
Through laws (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.) Cromwell tries to bring about a repression of mind at the end of the book that felt 1984 like. This made me think about what a just law means and if repression by the church is really worse than repression by a monarch.

Then we have the position of women, with even the wife of Cromwell saying to him that the divorce of Henry would lead to: All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty. turning against him.

And what struck me was also that what Henry as one of the mightiest of his time wants, a divorce, is so simple and available to everyone nowadays. Showing just how much our power of self determination has grown during the centuries. ...more

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Jan 16, 2020 Christopher rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, british, 21st-century, 500-pages-or-more

I honestly think I read a different book than everybody else. The praise for the story, the characters, the prose is near universal. Meanwhile, I'm slogging through the pages, feeling like I'm reading a muddled mess.

Disclaimer: I've never read a book about the Tudors, never watched one of the shows, and I have very little interest in royalty. I am very much a beginner when it comes to this history, and maybe this wasn't the right place to start.

So I wasn't too excited to read scenes of princes a I honestly think I read a different book than everybody else. The praise for the story, the characters, the prose is near universal. Meanwhile, I'm slogging through the pages, feeling like I'm reading a muddled mess.

Disclaimer: I've never read a book about the Tudors, never watched one of the shows, and I have very little interest in royalty. I am very much a beginner when it comes to this history, and maybe this wasn't the right place to start.

So I wasn't too excited to read scenes of princes and dukes discussing politics in a throne room, but Cromwell's personal life... now that's something I'm interested in. The plague knocking on their door, the various tragedies he must work through, the young men he takes as apprentices. His preparations for an incoming army of barbaric Northmen. I even enjoy listening to Cromwell explain how to get shillings knocked off the price of a load of bricks. But when he goes to Henry's court to have vaguely sinister and murky conversations with one of the fifteen earls or dukes named Henry or Thomas, well, my brain shuts off a bit. Those scenes are not my favorite part of this book... and unfortunately, that's most of the book.

There is no scene setting. There are very few descriptions of the places—Westminster, Austin Friars, Putney, Calais—our characters move to and from like chess pieces. Sometimes you'll read what seems to be an intimate conversation between two characters, but at the end of the scene you discover it took place in front of Henry's entire court; Mantel just didn't bother to tell you the context. Most of the novel consists of a succession of scenes which don't have any evident connection, and little segue between them. Mantel will simply announce, "1531 Michaelmas, Putney" and then "1532 springtime, Austin Friars."

The narrative voice is ambiguous. Sometimes the story is told by an anonymous limited perspective, sometimes Cromwell himself barges in and takes over the narration himself. Every now and then it even slips into second person. I see no rhyme nor reason to it. Quotation marks are optional for dialogue. Mantel drops in colons liberally. "She smiles: a twist of her mouth." Sometimes a sentence will be populated mainly by semicolons.

Then, of course, there's the whole debacle of the pronoun "he". Mantel generally refuses to name Cromwell, so if there's a "he" that does not obviously refer to someone, it probably refers to Cromwell. The problem is that there are plenty of men in this book, and the pronoun gets confusing. Take this instance, the first sentence of a chapter: "When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he feels shy of it." So you think, oh, Hans is feeling humble about his painting. Was it not a good painting? But the next sentence "He remembers when Walter would say, look me in the face, boy, when you tell me a lie." So you think, hmm, who does Hans know named Walter? And then you realize that the "he" in the first sentence doesn't refer to Hans but to Cromwell. "When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he (Cromwell) feels shy of it." You constantly have to backtrack to make sure you understand sentences--or sometimes whole scenes--correctly. Since when is this acceptable writing?

There's very little character development. Right at the beginning of the novel, we are given a glimpse into Cromwell's childhood, his abusive father, having to run away from his hometown, becoming a mercenary. Those are events that build a character. But there's little connection between that Cromwell and the Cromwell that is loyal to the Cardinal, or the Cromwell who works so hard for King Henry and Anne Boleyn. Where does that ambition come from? Why does he care to accomplish the king's desires? New characters aren’t introduced, they just exist and then sometimes they don’t anymore. They’re not given many distinguishing qualities, other than a leaf on a family tree in the front of the book. There's a point near the end where Cromwell and Gardiner wax poetic about being characters in a puppet play. A wooden puppet is about how lifelike most of the supporting characters felt to me.

But it really all comes down to this: I had no prior interest in the Tudors and this book gave me no more reasons to be interested. It didn't give me characters to care about and the story wasn't engaging on an entertaining or emotional level. If you're already into the Tudors, have watched some shows and movies about them, know the history, know the cast of characters, then I can imagine this book is like gobbling up morsel after morsel of details from that world. There were a handful of really interesting scenes. But as a novel, it unfortunately did not come close to working for me. ...more

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Feb 28, 2020 Jenny added it · review of another edition

Another book where I’m stumped about how I will ultimately rate it.
For the first 250 pages almost literally nothing happens. By the end I’m glad I stuck with it and am able to appreciate the writing style.
Mantel only bothers to bring the main character to life. The story is of greed, ambition and the moral ability to say anything it takes to battle your way to the forefront of power and influence. I dislike dirty politics and reality TV shows featuring people who are pointlessly mean to each o ...more

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