Wolf Hall by Hilary MantelMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of those few novels where I’ve found myself wanting to instantly reshelve it under ‘to re-read” the moment I finished, because once just wasn’t enough. Like I feel like I kind of understand it, but at the same time there’s just too much to unpack and keep track of throughout that it wasn’t really possible for me to feel satisfied after one run-through-- even though I probably made it worse by splitting it across a couple of months. And I still have to read the sequel (where things really start to go down) first.
Anyway, I’ve already found myself in the odd position of having to defend what exactly it is that makes this book interesting to me twice (-__-), because whatever words first come to mind don’t really do this book justice, so this may come across as a bit more of a sales pitch than usual— except that I’m not really good at sales pitches, nor do I really know how to make one, and my writing style tends to messily digress a lot when it comes to this kind of stuff so please bear with me while I dress up this entire review with loads of historical context.
Wolf Hall basically covers a time period that some people (usually female friends in my experience) may be familiar with from the likes of the TV show The Tudors, or that Natalie Portman film The Other Boleyn Girl. Or to those who bothered paying attention in European history class, that time when the king of England (Henry VIII) decided that he was done with his wife of 20-something years and wanted to divorce her... only for that to result in the creation of the brand new church of England (aka the Anglican church, from whose depths spawned the likes of C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright) because the Catholic church didn’t allow for divorces and Henry decided he was better than the Pope so “why not make my own church!”
Cue five more wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived) followed by Queen Elizabeth I, and that’s my Cliff Notes summary of the terrible, no good, very bad reign of Henry VIII for you. (I also forgot to mention that he had a reputation for being fat... not that you'd know it after seeing how sexy he is in the Tudors.)
So if you didn’t realize it by now, this time period’s been covered fairly thoroughly by other authors already (the most popular being Phillipa Gregory and Alison Weir), so why read yet another book about Henry VIII?
Well to be honest, this book isn’t really about Henry (who doesn’t show up for maybe… 50 pages?) so much as it is about his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell*, or the guy who helped Henry politically orchestrate the whole divorce-remarry-and-found-a-new-religion business and therefore established himself as the coming of the Antichrist in the flesh according to some conservative folks of his day.
(*Not to be confused with BBC’s #10 greatest Briton of all time/regicidal dictator Oliver Cromwell, although the two actually were related through Thomas’s nephew Richard Williams, who is also in this book but decided to change his last name to Cromwell later in life because I guess he loved his uncle so much.)
Even to this day, Thomas (who I’m referring to by first name to not confuse him with Oliver... but will now refer to as Cromwell because of all the other freaking Thomas’s in this book ugh) has a bad reputation, especially when compared with the likes of his arch-nemesis, Stephen Gardiner-- I mean his other arch-nemesis, Thomas More. (Yes, for those of you who took European history, that Thomas More. And now that I think about it oh my god it’s A.Ham vs A.Burr all over again). More was a staunch defender of Catholicism in England in his day, which lends him credence to modern-day Catholics and even made him the righteous subject of a notable 1960’s award-winning film, A Man for All Seasons— which showcased Cromwell as more of a ruthless self-serving villain and which Mantel ostensibly wrote this novel in response to.
The point being, it’s really easy to vilify Cromwell on the basis of what he did (you know… allowing Henry’s selfish whims to virtually flip the entire fabric of Christianity overnight the way Jesus flipped tables) without really knowing anything about him as a person, so Mantel’s novel seeks to change that by placing him within the wider context of his life experiences and relationships and thoughts in such a way as to humanize him for the rest of us, framing his choices and decisions as practical responses to the issues he faced, who did what he had to do in an otherwise hostile political and religious climate. In contrast with More, Cromwell gets to the point of asking, to what extent is it worth defending or sacrificing your life over abstract religious ideas? Especially when the argument over those ideas becomes pedantic in nature.
I should note that humanizing Cromwell doesn’t completely exonerate him from what he did; this story is still at its heart in some way a decades-long Machiavellian revenge epic against More and everyone else who’s ever slighted Cromwell since the first days of his career (although given the way that they’re portrayed here, they kinda deserve it). That said, it’d be a revenge story that I personally find much more compelling than the Count of Monte Cristo, in part because it, well... kinda actually did happen in real life. And unlike the Count, you don’t actually see Cromwell obsessively brood over exactly what he is about to do to person X for a thousand-pages on end before he actually does anything. I mean, you’re technically in his day-to-day thoughts throughout the entire book as he’s conducting his business, but Mantel apparently doesn’t show you all of those thoughts, because sometimes he’ll do something that seems to come out of nowhere… until upon careful research you realize that this was actually foreshadowed 300 pages ago and holy shit he’s been fooling us for that long?!?
(Note: you don’t actually have to go back that many pages to realize some of this, but this novel really does seem to reward careful readers. Mantel does a great job of telling without actually telling and showing only when it counts.)
To be fair, it’s impossible to know what the real Cromwell himself really thought, which is why Wolf Hall really functions as a work of historical fiction rather than nonfiction, but it does read convincingly enough to make you feel as though this Cromwell is close enough to the real one. It’s clear that Mantel herself did a lot of research in making this; there’s a considerable amount of attention to historical detail and ensuring that certain figures are historically in the right place at the right time for all the right events to happen. What’s new here is mainly the attempt to fill in the gaps in the historical record and breathe life into it at the same time.
I have to also address the writing style at this point, because it’s unique, but enough so to the point where it may be a dealbreaker for some people; it takes some adjusting to get used to and isn’t easy to read. Technically, Mantel writes from Cromwell’s perspective in the third person, but she does so in a way that’s almost like stream-of-consciousness without actually being that. I mean that to say, it feels like you’re reading a normal book, but then you get confused because Mantel’s constantly using the pronoun “he” all the time without identifying who “he” is until you realize that “he” is usually Cromwell himself, but it still gets confusing to read when other characters (especially the other Thomas’s) are there, and it doesn't help that the size of the character roster here reaches Russian novel levels of confusion, which I didn't even think was possible. I think most works written in 3rd person do so with a narrator who’s somewhat detached from the main character, but in this case there’s not much of a distinction between the external narration and the internal narration of Cromwell’s mind, so they both tend to almost flow into each other and you kinda have to read things carefully to distinguish between them and other characters or else you’ll get lost fast.
All of that said, this book is also just plain fun to read at times. It oozes with style and wit, and does a good job of framing the conflicts of the day enough for you to realize their gravity (like the need to choose between Pope and King, which when you think about it is on par with England declaring war on the Vatican) while simultaneously poking fun at the absurdity of the whole situation— like the fact that they actually conducted a full-blown trial just to prove whether or not Henry’s wife Catherine consummated her previous marriage 20 years after the fact (to which one sarcastically asks: “Were there any witnesses hiding under the covers that night?”); I’m pretty sure Game of Thrones took inspiration from that. I want to say it’s almost the modern-day equivalent of Shakespeare levels of witty, although that's probably more a reflection of how few actual witty novels I’ve read still. I wish I took notes of other quotable moments (some great jokes/commentary on the injustices women faced back then and even still today), but I’ll have to save that for another time.
I’ve probably hyped this up way more than I should have by now (I’ll admit I’m a sucker for anything history related), but I really do feel like this book does its subject matter justice in a way that I haven’t really seen before. And for that, I feel that it deserves all the attention it can get, even though it’s surprisingly difficult for me to explain in person to people who have no idea about the time period or why I find stuff like this interesting. I just think there’s value in trying to understand the reality and lived experiences of people in times and places completely beyond what we’re familiar with in the present, but especially moreso in the case of history, and this book is an example to me of one that conveys that sense refreshingly well. And I feel like I’ve still barely touched on a bunch of other issues that this book deals with.
I probably will have to re-read this and re-evaluate my opinions another time. After Bringing Up the Bodies then.
Oh and if you're lazy you can probably just watch the BBC miniseries adaptation that came out a couple of years ago.
