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Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)

Hilary Mantel

Start date: January 1, 2021

Finish date: March 31, 2021

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Feb 28, 2010 Laura rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-fiction, award-winning, historical-fiction, books-in-a-series, perspective, politics, power

Wolf Hall has been on my reading pile since its publication in 2009, and I've started reading it more than once. This summer I picked it up again and finished it.

In Wolf Hall, Mantel provides another look at historical figures we all know well or at least think we do through the stories we have read--Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Princess Mary, Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn, Thomas Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Howard, Jane Seymour, Hans Holbein, and more--namely, Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall has been on my reading pile since its publication in 2009, and I've started reading it more than once. This summer I picked it up again and finished it.

In Wolf Hall, Mantel provides another look at historical figures we all know well or at least think we do through the stories we have read--Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Princess Mary, Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn, Thomas Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Howard, Jane Seymour, Hans Holbein, and more--namely, Thomas Cromwell. It is Thomas Cromwell that Mantel places as the principal player in this historical retelling.

Mantel paints Cromwell with a lot more texture than he typically receives. That is, while Cromwell is still a man of ambition, pragmatism, intellect, and ruthlessness, he's also a man capable of affection and prone to great insight. She depicts the complexities in the relationships among Cromwell, More, and King Henry. While the 650+ pages and a slew of characters are somewhat daunting (seriously, so...many...men named Thomas), it was largely this startling new sympathetic depiction of Cromwell that contributed to my many false starts getting through this book. Once I invested in this new version of Cromwell's character, finishing this book became a foregone conclusion. Pick this book up if you're willing to exert some effort to follow along with the many characters and historical (political, religious, cultural...) intricacies and pronoun perplexities; it will be a good fit for hearty readers who are fascinated by the Tudor period or who just enjoy masterful historical fiction in general.

Hilary Mantel has won many awards and much praise for Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall, the first in a planned trilogy, covers the first few decades of the 16th century--beginning with Cromwell's rise to wealth and power from poverty and obscurity and ending with More's death and Cromwell's plans to visit Wolf Hall. The next two books should pick up the story from there.

Speaking of stories, one rainy day Cromwell's son Gregory sits reading Le Morte d’Arthur and musing about stories and truth and rumors of Henry and Anne (e.g., "they say the king does not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him like a farmer's wife"). His musings conclude with an apt summation of Wolf Hall as a whole, "Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories." Wolf Hall is a good story; bring on Bringing Up the Bodies (and, eventually, The Mirror and the Light; I'm pacing myself)!
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