To the 16th Century and Back: My Review of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall'

‘Wolf Hall’ is a dazzling, bewitching insight into the richly textured world of Tudor England, revolving around Henry VIII and his relentless quest to provide a male heir for his country and make Anne Boleyn his bride. This novel does not seek to inform the reader about the religious and social turmoil of the time; in fact, previous knowledge of this period is needed to sustain the reader through the intricate plot, with a character list that spreads five pages alone. Mantel rewrites Tudor history through the keen eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who is cast as the book’s protagonist. We follow him on his journey from the abused son of a blacksmith to the loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey, a character who lives on in Cromwell’s mind long after his death, to a trusted advisor of the king and the confidante of Anne Boleyn.

            Mantel’s narrative style is remarkable, akin to a constant stream of Cromwell’s consciousness, yet she uses only ‘he’ to refer to his thoughts. This proximity to the character achieves an impressive feat: Cromwell is rehabilitated, for his human side is depicted as well as his ruthless ambition. However, this does make it hard to decipher who is speaking, and it took me a while to tune into the frequency of her prose. Nevertheless, this idiosyncrasy is forgotten in the vivid, unique imagery that illuminates her work, and a fluid enjambement that completely engrosses the reader. She is a self-confessed addict to colons, which are ubiquitous in her prose.

            The use of the present tense creates immediacy; however, ‘Wolf Hall’ is so sumptuous with minute, meticulous details, that they act almost as speed bumps, forcing the reader to adopt a slow reading pace to fully appreciate the cornucopia of historical embellishments: from the stench of the privy to the texture of the king’s clothes, from a delicate description of Thomas More’s turkey carpet to a graphic depiction of the gruesome burning of a heretic, whose ‘chains retained the remnants of flesh, sucking and clinging’. No expense is spared: Mantel’s England is a filthy, bloody affair. The detail found is a testament to the length of the book, as Mantel takes 650 pages to move her reader through a relatively short time span. For me, reading it was a labour of love: you emerge from the 16^th Century after half an hour to find that you have read perhaps only ten pages of the book. In a review of the sequel, ‘Bring Up The Bodies’, Nicole Shulman wrote in the Spectator that, ‘in her [Mantel’s] historical fiction, the rubble of research is ground to a dust so fine that it settles into every phrase, every glance and gesture, so that we seem really to see through eyes that opened on the late 15th Century.’

            ‘Wolf Hall’ is also pervaded by the spirits of Cromwell’s past, affording it a strange, dream-like quality. This is a characteristic of many of Mantel’s books, and her state of mind is understandable after reading her aptly-named autobiography, ‘Giving Up The Ghost’. She has been haunted throughout her life by the child that she could never have; the figures of his dead wife and children linger in Cromwell’s mind as well. One description encapsulates this: ‘he doesn’t believe that the dead come back; but that doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wingtips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less individual forms and faces than a solid, aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen’.

            To comb through ‘Wolf Hall’s dense forest of language would take too long, and I feel I cannot do it justice in text; such powerful, compelling words deserve to be savoured in their original form. This book and, I assume, its sequel, were thoroughly deserving of the Man Booker prize; it remains to be seen whether the culmination to her Tudor trilogy is duly rewarded, or if she has inherited a poisoned chalice. One thing is certain: her writing is unlike anything I have ever experienced, and she is arguably our finest living writer.