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by Hilary Mantel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2009

Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor.

Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII’s schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn.

Versatile British novelist Mantel ( Giving Up the Ghost , 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (1527–35) of Henry’s long, tumultuous reign. They’re chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father’s beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope’s permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings’ children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel’s language is original, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8050-8068-1

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009

HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

SEEN & HEARD

WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “ You’ll get only one shot at this ,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “ Don’t botch it .” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “ That form is a deal breaker ,” he tells himself. “ It’s life and death .” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

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Renaissance Men

By christopher benfey, published: october 29, 2009.

“Try always,” says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel ’s fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s turbulent court, “to find out what people wear under their clothes.” Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can’t produce an heir, wears a nun’s habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won’t let the king know what she’s wearing until their wedding night; she says “yes, yes, yes” to him, “then she says no.” Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king’s dirty work just as he once did the cardinal’s, what is he hiding under his lawyer’s sober winter robes? Something “impermeable,” Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell’s forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone.

Illustration by Esther Pearl Watson

By Hilary Mantel

532 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $27

Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize (October 7, 2009)

Times topic: hilary mantel.

Excerpt: ‘Wolf Hall’ (Google Books)

Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘Wolf Hall’ (October 5, 2009)

Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein’s great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his “good eyes’ stern, facetious twinkle,” in Robert Lowell’s description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, “sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.” One of the many achievements of Mantel’s dazzling novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize , is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours.

Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel — tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were “a sheet of metal”; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because “France is where they have wars.” Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family.

In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian “art of memory” (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel “Fludd”), in which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images.

Cromwell is also, as Mantel sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther’s battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the “brutal truth” of the Scriptures. “Why does the pope have to be in Rome?” Cromwell wonders. “Where is it written?” Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn’s “resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom” caught the king’s eye. Mantel, with the novelist’s license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: “Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked.” Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For Mantel, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry’s divorce is the impetus for Cromwell’s “Tudor Revolution,” as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule.

In “Wolf Hall” it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the “quaking world” aright. “Utopia,” Cromwell learns early on, “is not a place one can live.” More’s refusal to recognize Henry’s marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” and its 1966 screen version. To Mantel’s Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt’s title, seeks a way out for his old rival.

There’s a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? “You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again.” Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell’s. “That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash.”

In her long novel of the French Revolution, “A Place of Greater Safety,” Mantel also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of “Wolf Hall.” Yet, although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels — the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase — her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, “the man in charge of everything,” falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us.

Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. “Wolf Hall” has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator’s day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society — not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia. “When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power,” Cromwell reflects. “Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.” Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is both spellbinding and believable.

Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of “Degas in New Orleans” and “A Summer of Hummingbirds.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 1, 2009, on page BR 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Renaissance Men.

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REVIEW: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I sometimes feel like I’ve been reading or watching historical fiction based on the reign of Henry VIII since childhood. Probably my first memories of any knowledge of this period in English history were school lessons where I somehow gleaned that Henry had eight wives and cut off all of their heads (I may have briefly confused him with Bluebeard; I *was* young). As a young adult I read up on the era where I could and watched Anne of the Thousand Days (probably one of the more sympathetic portraits of Anne Boleyn I’ve come across, IIRC) and memorized the order of Henry’s wives and their fates (“divorced, beheaded, died in childbirth, divorced, beheaded, outlived him”). Later there were Philippa Gregory novels and The Tudors on cable. The latter is not anything I’d suggest for those looking for historical accuracy, but it did give a good overview of the period and the players; it may have been through that show that I first became really aware of Thomas Cromwell as a historical figure.

Wolf Hall focuses on Thomas Cromwell and tells the story of his meteoric rise from the abused son of a blacksmith to self-made man to right-hand adviser to Henry VIII. Through his eyes we get to see many of the familiar faces of the era: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, Thomas Cranmer, and of course, Henry himself. (It says something about that era that I think of that list 50% of them ended up beheaded.)

The writing style of Wolf Hall is idiosyncratic and thus I found it hard to get into, at first. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I am terrible with identifying narrative styles unless they are pretty basic: first person present tense, first person past tense, etc. I just knew I found the style in this novel confusing. So I looked it up: Wolf Hall is written in third person limited present tense. The reader gets Cromwell’s POV only, though it takes a while for that to be totally clear.

What made the style most confusing is that the pronoun “he” is used constantly, but often it wasn’t clear which “he” was being referred to. I had to train myself to realize that when I got lost, it was a safe bet that the “he” in question was Cromwell himself. This sounds frustrating and bewildering, and at first it was, but I did figure it out fairly quickly and once I was in the right mindset, I actually enjoyed the style. (I mean, I wouldn’t want to read it all the time – present tense is more suited to first person in my mind and even then I don’t always like it – but it ended up working for Wolf Hall .)

(There were still times when I had to go back over dialogue because if there was a run of say, 20 lines of dialogue, I could get lost as to who was speaking because there was never any indication – e.g. “Anne said” attached to a line of dialogue. But that didn’t happen that often.)

The thing I found most interesting about Wolf Hall was the portrayal of Cromwell himself. Again, I was most familiar with the representation from The Tudors , and that was not a kind one – that Cromwell was cruel and grasping. A little Googling confirms that history in general does not view Cromwell with favor, but in Wolf Hall he’s a very sympathetic character. Perhaps this is a due to the fact that the story is told from Cromwell’s POV; getting inside a character’s head, even in the third person, tends to make that character more understandable because you’re seeing the world through his eyes.

Even inside his head, Cromwell is a difficult man to really know. His thoughts and emotions tend to be muted, and it’s only through subtle cues, for instance, that the reader feels his grief at the loss, through illness, of his wife and daughters, or his dismay at the long, slow fall of his patron and mentor, Cardinal Woolsey.

As portrayed in the book, Cromwell is not a vengeful man – he lets the many insults about his origins slide off his back, and he gives his antagonist Thomas More many chances to repent and seems to regret More’s eventual execution. (More, in another switch-around, is not given the heroic treatment he’s often afforded in other historical portraits; here, he’s a pedantic and small-minded religious zealot who is smug until almost the bitter end. Though he may be ill-treated by Henry for sincerely held religious convictions, he himself tortured others without mercy when the shoe was on the other foot.)

However, if Cromwell seems less petty and ego-driven than many of the other characters in the novel, there are hints that he has a deep capacity for remembering a slight. The most chilling instance comes when the reader realizes that the young musician in Woolsey’s household whom Cromwell, early in the book, overhears casually insulting him is Mark Smeaton. If you know your Tudor history, you recognize Smeaton as one of the men eventually tortured and executed as a lover of Anne Boleyn. This book ends with More’s execution; I believe the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies , deals with Anne’s fall, but the way Cromwell keeps an eye on Smeaton in Wolf Hall and maneuvers him into a place where he can gain revenge on him is a reminder that while he may be sympathetic (to this reader, at least), Cromwell is not a man to be crossed.

In doing a little research for this review, I discovered that Wolf Hall has been criticized in some quarters for a lack of historical accuracy and for being “anti-Catholic.” On the first charge, it’s hard to know how to feel – Wolf Hall , is after all, fiction, and most of the instances of supposed inaccuracy cited seemed to have to do not with outright manipulation of historical facts but with imbuing Cromwell’s character with thoughts and feelings for which there is no historical basis. But, I mean, again, it’s FICTION. Even actual historical biography often (maybe even usually) has some slant and interpretation to it, so I can’t really ding a work of fiction for having a perspective, even if it’s a non-conventional one. It’s not like the story goes off in a completely unsupported direction, I don’t think, in portraying More as, say, a lecher or a cynic – it just puts his religious severity in a less favorable light than one usually sees.

More tortured people and Cromwell tortured people – I think the historical record is pretty clear on that. There appears to be some evidence (again, simply gleaned from some Googling) that More was enthusiastic about torture, or at least about burning heretics. One could argue that he believed he was doing their eternal souls a favor, but still – somebody who expresses relish over burning a human being to death is not saintly in my mind, and criticism of such a person is fair.

As for Cromwell, I haven’t read the sequel, Bring up the Bodies , yet, never mind the yet-unpublished third book, so it’s possible that his character changes later, and his finer feelings get pushed aside in his ruthless rise to power. But I think Mantel manages to create an interesting and plausible portrait of a man who is complex, pragmatic, sometimes ruthless, and yet ultimately sympathetic.

Regarding the anti-Catholicism charge, I didn’t really see it – the Catholic Church in England at the time is portrayed as corrupt and greedy, but I certainly don’t think that’s an unfair depiction. Protestants are not exactly portrayed as being on the “right” side – Henry’s turn away from the Church of Rome clearly has to do with the Church’s refusal to grant him a divorce and with his desire to get his hands on the Church’s riches in England, riches he seems to believe rightfully belong to the King. I think actual religious conviction is a distant third on the list of reasons for Henry’s break.

Cromwell shows sympathy for dissidents (and gives them aid at times), but he doesn’t seem to be hugely religious either way – like Henry, his reasons for supporting the break with Rome seem more pragmatic than anything else. He does recall an early memory of being a child and witnessing the burning of some Lollards, an event that apparently had an effect on him, but he seems more distressed by the bloodlust he sees on display than anything else. Again, Cromwell’s passions – anger, lust, or any other strong emotion – feel muted in general throughout the book. His driving force is obviously personal ambition, but even that’s made clearer through his actions than his thoughts.

Why do I feel the need to defend Wolf Hall against the criticisms of it? Well, I like the book, for one thing. But it also goes to my beliefs about what leeway I think a historical author should have (as opposed to a biographer, who I do believe has a duty to avoid prejudice as much as possible). This probably wouldn’t be an issue if the novel hadn’t won the prestigious Booker Prize – I mean, I don’t recall people getting that het up about Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter , which I think we’ll agree is probably less historically accurate than Wolf Hall . I think because Wolf Hall is popular and prominent and well-written and researched enough to be seen as scholarly, historians get themselves a bit twisted in knots over artistic license when they really don’t need to be.

If you’re interested in the period and the players and don’t come to the story with a strong prejudice against Thomas Cromwell to start, I think Wolf Hall can be read and enjoyed as the well-written historical fiction about a fascinating man that it is. My grade for it was a high B+.

(BTW, PBS just recently began running a BBC adaption of the book. I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to catch it soon. Damian Lewis plays Henry VIII!)

Best regards,

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Why we haven't reviewed it yet: Haven't gotten our hands on a copy yet Chances that we will review it: Slim -- like her work, and the reviews make it sound tempting, but it's still a heap of historical fiction - Return to top of the page -


Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
	A	25/5/2009	Julie Myerson
	.	2/5/2009	Christopher Tayler
	.	8/5/2009	Marianne Brace
London Rev. of Books	.	30/4/2009	Colin Burrow
	A	8/10/2009	Ross King
	.	21/5/2009	Rachel Aspden
	A+	5/11/2009	Stephen Greenblatt
The NY Times	.	5/10/2009	Janet Maslin
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	1/11/2009	Christopher Benfey
	.	19/10/2009	Joan Acocella
	A	6/12/2009	Joan Frank
	.	3/5/2009	Stuart Kelly
	A+	13/5/2009	Anne Chisholm
	B+	3/5/2009	Andrew Holgate
	A	28/4/2009	Lucy Hughes-Hallett
	.	1/5/2009	Claudia FitzHerbert
	A+	25/4/2009	Vanora Bennett
	.	15/5/2009	Michael Caines
	A	10/10/2009	Martin Rubin
	A	6/10/2009	Wendy Smith

Review Consensus : Very positive -- and see it as a possible breakout book for her From the Reviews : " Wolf Hall is a fantastically well-wrought, detailed and convincing novel (....) There is so much to praise in Wolf Hall (.....) Despite its length, the pace is fast. A couple of hundred pages in, you feel as if you might drown in its volume. But you emerge at the end dazed and moved, properly infected by the period. It both is and isn�t an easy read. (...) But where Mantel really excels is in the small, dark stuff." - Julie Myerson, Financial Times "In Wolf Hall , Mantel persuasively depicts this beefy pen-pusher and backstairs manoeuvrer as one of the most appealing -- and, in his own way, enlightened -- characters of the period. (...) How do you write about Henry VIII without being camp or breathless or making him do something clunkily non-stereotypical ? Mantel attacks the problem from several angles, starting by knowing a lot about the period but not drawing attention to how strenuously she's imagining it. Meaty dialogue takes precedence over description, and the present-tense narration is so closely tied to the main character that Cromwell is usually called plain "he", even when it causes ambiguities. Above all, Mantel avoids ye olde-style diction, preferring more contemporary phrasing. (...) Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it's not like much else in contemporary British fiction." - Christopher Tayler, The Guardian "Mantel's writing is taut; the dialogue sprints along, witty and convincing. She draws her extensive cast with deft strokes." - Marianne Brace, The Independent "Mantel�s chief method is to pick out tableaux vivants from the historical record -- which she has worked over with great care -- and then to suggest that they have an inward aspect which is completely unlike the version presented in history books. The result is less a historical novel than an alternative history novel. It constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew. (...) Mantel�s ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional." - Colin Burrow, London Review of Books "Mantel's abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing. She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of Tudor England." - Ross King, The Los Angeles Times "In the hands of Hilary Mantel, Tudor kitsch becomes something darker and less digestible. Wolf Hall takes a forensic slice through a nation caught between feudalism and capitalism, the Middle Ages and modernity, Catholicism and the revolutionary doctrines emerging from the Continent. (...) Mantel�s prose, like her hero, is witty and tough-minded." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman "Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all. (...) This is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears." - Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books "This witty, densely populated book may experience a rough passage when it crosses the Atlantic. For readers not fully versed in the nuances of England�s tangled royal bloodlines, not amused by Ms. Mantel�s deliberate obliqueness (...) or not even familiar with the effect of the law of praemunire on the papacy, Wolf Hall has its share of stumbling blocks. (...) But her book�s main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. (...) Hilary Mantel�s Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable." - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review "Mantel�s characters do not speak sixteenth-century English. She has created for them an idiom that combines a certain archaism with vigorous modern English. It works perfectly. And how urbane her people are! (...) The prose is elastic. Sometimes it�s elliptical. (...) Elsewhere it is full, or overfull." - Joan Acocella, The New Yorker "Plot summary, for a 560-page novel that offers at its outset two charts of family trees and five pages of character names, proves a bit impractical. (...) Dialogue sings and crackles, in language that is at once lyrical, decorous and slangily modern (.....) His brilliant company, and the life-size pageant of his world, give such sustained pleasure that we are greedy for particulars of a story whose outcome, in theory, we already know." - Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle "Mantel's triumph is to take a figure associated with ambition, scheming and avarice and transform him into a sympathetic, humane and supremely modern man. (...) Mantel's approach is oblique and ingenious. (...) Wolf Hall manages to unite her interests thus far. It is a novel about power, both political and supernatural, in which Cromwell manipulates the invisible web of profit just as disgruntled priests conjure up expedient prophets. Accountancy and astrology vie with each other." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday "With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell (.....) She creates immediacy by using the present tense, and a sense of intimacy with the characters through dialogue. She gives their language period touches, but never falls into pastiche. The pieces of the jigsaw may be familiar, but she shuffles them around so that the full picture emerges only gradually, in bright fragments." - Anne Chisholm, The Spectator "(A) vibrant, often compelling mix of the personal and the political (.....) Cromwell is an arrestingly complex figure in Mantel�s retelling. (...) The book has many other alluring qualities. Mantel�s characterisation is acute (...) Above all, Mantel�s recreation of the era feels both accurate and natural. By focusing, not on the famous set-pieces, but on the human interaction taking place around them, she makes the reader complicit in the drama. (...) The effect, sadly, is to turn a potentially outstanding novel into merely a commendable one." - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times "This is a splendidly ambitious book, ample enough to hold a crowd of people and to encompass historical events across all of Europe (the sack of Rome is described in one vivid paragraph) and hint at at least another novel�s worth of themes." - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Telegraph "In lesser hands Cromwell�s modern sympathies -- believing in nurture over nature, loving over burning, learning over prayer -- might make for a lifeless and anachronistic portrait. But the devil is in the language and Mantel animates the familiar story with great imagination. (...) Mantel knows how to build a picture from the parts available, with nothing extraneous and everything layered." - Claudia FitzHerbert, The Telegraph "But as soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle -- one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too." - Vanora Bennett, The Times "Unusually for a novel 650 pages long, Wolf Hall is written in the present tense, which enhances its feverishness. This lends both people and their possessions a dramatic clarity, a presence, which an informed, retrospective viewpoint, left almost entirely to the reader�s imagination, might have marred. We are not looking back at a path through time, but trying to find our way onward, and uncertainty reigns. (...) In this way, the novel becomes a play, becomes a gallery, conscious of its own framing devices, and is all the richer for being a historiographical as well as a historical novel." - Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement "Ms. Mantel has a knack for getting under the skin of her characters and capturing them (one feels) as they must have been" - Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal "(F)rom this seemingly shopworn material, Hilary Mantel has created a novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry's formidable advisor, Thomas Cromwell. (...) Wolf Hall is uncompromising and unsentimental, though alert readers will detect an underlying strain of gruff tenderness. Similarly, Mantel's prose is as plain as her protagonist (who's sensitive about his looks), but also (like Cromwell) extraordinarily flexible, subtle and shrewd." - Wendy Smith, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

Notes about the Reviews and the Book's Reception :

About the Author :

English author Hilary Mantel was born in 1952. Author of several highly praised novels, she won the Hawthornden Prize in 1996.

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Hubris and Delusion at the End of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Trilogy

In the opening pages of Hilary Mantel’s 1994 novel, “ A Change of Climate ,” a woman in a railway carriage stares disapprovingly at the cover of the cheesy paperback her travelling companion is reading. It’s clearly a work of historical fiction, the archly period title, “Wyfe to Crookback,” traced in “florid gold script.” (The “wyfe” in question is Anne Neville, unhappy queen to the legendarily hunchbacked Richard III.) Although the woman, Emma, is a physician, she evidently knows a thing or two about late-Plantagenet domestic architecture; as she examines the cover art, she notes that the manor house behind the heroine (“a svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple”) has “anachronistic chimney stacks.” The vulgar font, the clueless art work, even the “fat” paperback’s size, with its intimation of a future at the beach: all this is meant to indict the middlebrow taste of Emma’s fellow-passenger, Ginny, a posh neighbor who happens to be the wyfe of Emma’s lover.

Getting the past right—or wrong—has always been a theme in Mantel’s fiction, much of which features characters who, like Emma and Ginny, struggle to come to terms with histories they’d rather not talk about. But it’s hard, now, not to read the “Wyfe to Crookback” episode as being prophetic. From 1985, when she published her first book, until about ten years ago, Mantel earned admiration for a string of strikingly idiosyncratic works of fiction, most of them about modern people in contemporary settings, and for her numerous essays and reviews in publications like The New York Review of Books . But she achieved celebrity only after she committed herself to the genre and the period that she pokes fun at in that scene on the train. The publication, in 2009, of “ Wolf Hall ,” whose protagonist was Henry VIII’s brilliant consigliere, Thomas Cromwell, and of its sequel, “ Bring Up the Bodies ,” in 2012—a series that, with the release this week of “ The Mirror and the Light ” (Henry Holt), has become a trilogy—has brought Mantel a degree of popular success that is rare for authors of serious literary fiction. (The first two novels were adapted to great acclaim for both stage and television, further expanding her audience.) Anticipation for her latest Tudor offering has been running high: at a Waterstones bookstore in London last August, banners urging customers to preorder it were already fluttering above the shelves.

Such popularity has partly to do with the period itself. With its wild extremes—the high color and low motives, the befeathered courtiers and barbecued clerics, the oversexed kings and Virgin Queens, the (sometimes literally) outsized monarchs whose erotic whims or neuroses could trigger global crises—the Tudor era has exercised a powerful fascination on artistic imaginations for centuries. There have been tsunamis of novels, from Sir Walter Scott, in the early nineteenth century, and Jean Plaidy, in the mid-twentieth (“Katharine, the Virgin Widow,” “The Captive Queen of Scots,” etc.), to best-selling authors today such as Philippa Gregory or C. J. Sansom, whose lovelorn hero, a hunchbacked lawyer, solves mysteries emanating from the court of Henry VIII. Dramatizations have run the gamut from Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 verse drama “ Maria Stuart ,” about the conflict between the eponymous Queen of Scots and her cousin Elizabeth I—roles later coveted by Sarah Bernhardt, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Glenda Jackson, and Saoirse Ronan, to name just a few—to the glossy Showtime series “The Tudors,” in which Henry and his courtiers were impersonated by what appeared to be underwear models. There were even operas. The nineteenth-century Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti composed three: “Anna Bolena,” “Roberto Devereux,” and “Maria Stuarda.”

Because of Mantel’s literary bona fides, no one was likely to confuse her entries into this crowded field with the kind of stuff that the woman is reading on the train. But the question of how to approach historical fiction has clearly haunted the author. There’s a scene in “Wolf Hall” in which Cromwell, reminiscing about his shady past in Italy, recalls the time he scammed a gullible cardinal into buying a fake antique:

“Well, we had a statue made, a smirking little god with wings, and then we beat it with hammers and chains to make it antique, and we hired a muleteer and drove it to Rome and sold it to a cardinal . . . I remember he had tears in his eyes when he paid us. ‘To think that on these charming little feet and these sweet pinions, the gaze of the Emperor Augustus may have rested.’ When the Portinari boys set off for Florence they were staggering under the weight of their purses.” “And you?” “I took my cut and stayed on to sell the mules.”

How do you make a new work feel old? In fiction, one way—what you might call the Walter Scott approach—is to focus on exteriors, to dress things up with florid gold script and quaint period diction, with feathers, furbelows, and frills. Another way emerged in the mid-twentieth century, when Marguerite Yourcenar’s “ Memoirs of Hadrian ” (1951) and Hermann Broch’s dauntingly monumental exercise in stream of consciousness, “ The Death of Virgil ” (1945), brought a modernist interiority to the genre—and in so doing raised the fraught question of the extent to which a writer could enter into the mentality of the past. Those works, as many saw it, attained to the level of High Literature.

The ingenious way Mantel had, in the first two installments of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, of making you feel as if you were eavesdropping on Cromwell’s thoughts suggests that she’s aligned herself with Yourcenar and Broch. But, if she didn’t bother to beat her tale with hammers and chains, it was also because she had an agenda of her own. On close inspection, the books about Henry VIII and his world turned out to have been animated by the same themes and preoccupations that have been at the center of her work all along.

Starting with her début, the creepily effective black comedy “ Every Day Is Mother’s Day ,” about a put-upon young social worker faced with a disturbing case, it has been clear that Mantel is interested in the past. But the histories she explored tended to be the unhappy pasts that individuals and families so often try to suppress, usually unsuccessfully and sometimes with disastrous results. Unlike many in the boys’ club of popular British authors, from Martin Amis to Kazuo Ishiguro, the younger Mantel, who until “Wolf Hall” was something of an outsider in the British literary establishment, chose to focus on a seamy, often ugly underside of English life: the grubby provinces, the crazy charwomen and delusional mediums, people and places with pasts worth fleeing. “But you have to put the past behind you, don’t you?” a character asks rhetorically in “ Vacant Possession ,” the sequel to “Every Day Is Mother’s Day.” “If it will let you,” comes the response. In Mantel, it usually doesn’t.

“A Change of Climate” wrenchingly dramatizes this theme. Set in the nineteen-eighties, it unfolds the story of a British couple, Anna and Ralph Eldred, who were the victims of a horrific act of violence when they were newlyweds working for a missionary society in southern Africa, in the fifties—a crime triggered when Anna carelessly offends an employee. (Mantel enjoys contrasting our desire to do good with the limits of our ability to comprehend the “others” whom we want to help.) Now back in England, the Eldreds never mention what happened, but the apparently normal and useful lives they lead—Ralph runs a family charity—are riven by fissures through which their past suffering rises to the surface, like a poisonous vapor, threatening to destroy the equilibrium they thought they’d achieved.

As for inauthenticity and inaccuracies, the misrepresentations that Mantel likes to expose aren’t of the anachronistic-chimney-stack kind. What interests her are the half-truths, evasions, and self-delusions that people cling to, often at great cost, in order to get through their (usually grim) lives. In “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” the social worker comes to see how her colleagues have chosen to delude themselves about the nature of the suffering and evil that they witness. At the center of these books stands an unsettlingly opaque figure, a mentally disturbed young woman named Muriel. At once malevolent and victimized, she represents another favorite theme of Mantel’s: the presence in life of an irreducible core of pain and unreason that resists any genial assumptions about the coherence or redeemability of the world. “I thought there was order in the world, at least—a kind of progress, a meaning, a pattern,” Ralph Eldred reflects in “A Change of Climate,” speaking for many of the author’s characters. “But where is the pattern now?”

Small wonder that Mantel has returned so often to the supernatural— ghosts, in particular. In many of her novels, the border between reality and unreality, sanity and madness, is as fuzzy as the one between past and present, truth and lies. (Muriel’s mother abuses her because she thinks she’s saving the girl from evil spirits that inhabit their house.) Sometimes this shadow world of lurking evil turns out to be explicable. In “ Eight Months on Ghazzah Street ” (1988), Frances, an Englishwoman who has accompanied her engineer husband to Saudi Arabia, finds herself a virtual prisoner in their apartment complex, where whispered comings and goings on the stairs and in the hallways provoke a growing paranoia in her, a “feeling that something is going on, just outside her range of vision.” Her conviction that she has detected a criminal cabal operating out of the apartment upstairs is questioned by everyone around her until the truth explodes, with devastating results. Frances is one of a number of Mantel’s female characters who must struggle to make themselves believed.

In other works, the border between natural and supernatural collapses under the pressure of unreason and suffering. In what may be Mantel’s masterpiece, “ Beyond Black ” (2005), a creamily luscious prose stands in disconcerting contrast to the bizarrenesses and horrors it narrates. Its protagonist is Alison, a morbidly obese medium who has to contend with some very real spirits, in particular a band of thugs led by a ghoul called Morris, who likes to lounge around her room playing with his fly. The irrepressible dead torment her as mercilessly now as they did when they were alive: when Alison was a child, we learn, they raped and tortured her. Mantel’s ghosts embody the histories that we can’t bury.

In an interview, Mantel referred with startling matter-of-factness to the presence of ghosts in her own life: “When I was a child I believed our house was haunted, and so—worryingly—did the grown-ups.” In a 2003 memoir called, unsurprisingly, “ Giving Up the Ghost ,” she writes of how, when she was seven, she witnessed something uncanny in the yard behind the family home: a ripple in the fabric of the afternoon, a disturbance in the atmosphere that, to her mind, had to do with “the nature of evil.” The recurrent figure of the ghost in Mantel’s works bridges two paramount themes: the lingering presence of the pasts we would forget, and the opacity of the evils, impervious to sense and impossible to “pattern,” that we suffer in the present. The darkness of her themes and the rebarbative strangeness of the narratives in which she clothed them may not have won her international fandom, but they bespeak a genuine and bracing originality.

Astonished helplessness in the presence of unreason and cruelty was what brought Mantel to the genre with which she is most closely identified today. In “Giving Up the Ghost,” she details the sufferings inflicted on her not only by the ignorant and vindictive nuns who taught her as a child, but also, later in life, by a long line of doctors who failed to take seriously a devastating chronic illness. Starting in her early adolescence, Mantel displayed symptoms of what turned out to be a severe case of endometriosis, a condition in which cells that normally appear inside the uterus grow outside it, causing crippling pain. Her symptoms were dismissed initially as psychosomatic or signs of a psychiatric illness. (Treated with antipsychotic drugs, she later experienced psychotic episodes.) It wasn’t until she was in her twenties, when she did her own research and diagnosed the problem, that proper treatment began.

At university, Mantel studied law, and in her memoir she writes of having developed an interest in the question of where “the powers of the state begin and end.” During her illness, she read extensively about the French Revolution and found in that history an external correlative to experiences she understood all too well from her time in school and in the clinics. “I began to read about the old regime, its casual cruelties, its heartless style,” she writes. “I thought, but I know this stuff. By nature, I knew about despotism: the unratified decisions, handed down from the top, arbitrarily enforced: the face of strength when it moves in on the weak.”

From that epiphany resulted the first novel that Mantel wrote, in 1979. (It wasn’t published until 1992.) “A Place of Greater Safety” is a work of historical fiction that entwines the lives of three leaders of the Revolution—Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre—from their childhoods until their early deaths at the hands of the movement they created. Mantel has recalled of her research, “I had pressed the juice of meaning from every scrap of paper . . . every note on every source,” but the book’s more than seven hundred pages suggest that she hadn’t yet figured out how to balance “history” and “fiction.” Among other things, her characters too often do what characters in historical fiction are, mortifyingly, forced to do, which is to emblematize or give voice to entire currents in history or thought. (“Free thought, free speech—is that too much to ask?”)

What Mantel needed, but hadn’t yet found, was a historical period and a historical figure that could serve, naturally and organically, as vehicles for further exploring the themes she’d always been interested in. Where is the boundary between truth and lies? Where does the power of the state begin and end? Is it possible to break away from the past, and, if so, to what extent? How does the conflict between a modern trust in reason, on the one hand, and primitive ignorance and irrationality, on the other, play out in the lives of individuals and of nations?

As it turned out, she needn’t have strayed to Paris to find an apt topic. For—as the world knows by now—the hero of the work she embarked on after she published “Beyond Black” is Cromwell, the innovative statesman who helped drag England from the Plantagenet Middle Ages into the early modern era, remaking it as a bureaucratic state while battling entrenched class privilege and religious fanaticism: a man who tried to maneuver between ambitious ideals and stubbornly irrational realities and lost his head doing so.

Critics reviewing the first two novels were unanimous in their admiration for how “utterly modern” they felt, the way in which they conjured a “powerful hallucination of presence.” Although Mantel occasionally deploys archaic diction (“gralloched”) or syntax (“no man shall have a fowl in his pot but he pay a levy on it”) to suggest an antique milieu, for the most part the books feel so contemporary because their style, their themes, and their hero are, in fact, manifestly modern. At the office, Cromwell hatches an F.D.R.-like plan to use government spending on public works as a means of elevating the lower classes. (To no avail: “Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work,” he bitterly reflects.) At home, he’s just another successful middle-aged businessman, fussing over the details of Christmas festivities, lavishing gifts of jewelry on his wife and nieces, and—he was a garmento at one point—guessing the cost of someone’s outfit to the nearest shilling.

By means of deftly interwoven flashbacks, “Wolf Hall” traces the astonishing rise from lowly origins that helps make Cromwell an appealing protagonist for today’s audiences, a hero of glass-ceiling-shattering mobility. The son of a commoner, perhaps a blacksmith or a brewer, he was born probably around 1485, the year in which “Crookback” was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry VIII’s father—the event that ended the centuries-old Plantagenet dynasty and brought the Tudors to power. The teen-age Cromwell left home—some say to escape his violent father—and spent a number of years on the Continent, in Antwerp and Italy, where he learned about banking and trade. This education would help him nudge England away from the chivalric and feudal mindset of the medieval world and into the modern one, which, as Mantel has him think, is run “not from castle walls, but from countinghouses.”

“Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” embraced many of the author’s long-standing preoccupations. Each volume elegantly mirrored the other’s structure, a symmetry that foregrounded the ironies of history and the complexities of Mantel’s Cromwell. In the end, he’s yet another of her characters who’s trying to impose a pattern on chaos.

A white woman touches a black woman's hair despite being told not to and her hand is bitten off as a result.

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The two books have the same basic plot: Cromwell’s ascent to ever-greater positions of power is contrasted with the downward trajectory of a queen against whom he connives. “Wolf Hall” tells the story of the ambitious minister’s scheme to bring down Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who, after a quarter century of marriage, hadn’t borne the King a male heir—a crisis known as “the King’s Great Matter.” Catherine was set aside in 1533 in favor of Anne Boleyn, a move that necessitated England’s break from the Roman Church, which had refused to annul the King’s marriage to Catherine. A touching element of that first installment is an evocation of Cromwell’s loyalty to his beloved mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor who fell from Henry’s favor for failing to achieve what his protégé eventually did.

“Bring Up the Bodies” raised the moral stakes and complicated the reader’s perception of Henry’s Lord Privy Seal—one of the many lofty titles that Cromwell eventually earned. Here, Cromwell smoothly engineers the downfall of the woman he’d gone to such efforts to see crowned. (Anne, it turned out, couldn’t produce a male heir, either.) Mantel skillfully sifts the immense and confusing historical record, finding moments that spotlight the moral cynicism that so often serves power. In “Wolf Hall,” the King’s ministers get wind of a rumor that, before she caught Henry’s eye, Anne had “pre-contracted” a marriage to a nobleman named Henry Percy—a quasi-legal arrangement that threatened the validity of her planned marriage to the King; Cromwell is shown bullying Percy into swearing an oath asserting that the pre-contract never existed. In “Bring Up the Bodies,” when Henry needs to get rid of Anne, Cromwell once again tracks down poor Percy, this time in order to intimidate him into retracting that oath—a hypocrisy at which Percy, to his credit, balks: “You made me a liar as I stood before God. Now you want to make me a fool as I stand before men.”

In Mantel’s presentation of Cromwell, this is all in a day’s work: a bookworm who reads Machiavelli, he doesn’t let niggling ethical and moral considerations get in the way of his prince’s grand agenda. The author’s early interest in the law bears fruit in a number of scenes in “Bring Up the Bodies” in which Cromwell is shown putting his legal and rhetorical talents to unsavory use. (Not content to rely on Percy, he and his associates levelled charges of treasonous adultery against the Queen and half a dozen courtiers, including her own brother.) Throughout the trilogy, there’s a chilling pleasure in observing Cromwell as he weaves verbal webs around his hapless prey. “You have no proof,” one of his aristocratic enemies incredulously exclaims during an interrogation. “All you allege is words, words, words.” But words are enough to make heads roll.

The fall of another character provided Mantel with a vehicle for revisiting an old theme. At the time of the split from Catherine and Rome, Henry’s Lord Chancellor was the scholar, theologian, and statesman Sir Thomas More, who was eventually executed for protesting the new religious and political arrangements that Cromwell effected. (The Catholic Church rewarded More with a sainthood.) In the acclaimed 1960 play “A Man for All Seasons”—later an Oscar-winning movie—More’s story was dramatized as a parable about heroic conscience speaking truth to brute power. But Mantel resists this appealing if sentimental interpretation. She makes More a symbol of a doctrinaire pre-modern mentality that baffles the forward-thinking Cromwell. During an imaginary conversation with More, he wonders:

Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

The next world: something else that Mantel does well in these books is to evoke the urgency of the theological and spiritual controversies of the era, which could well confound readers in a secular age. You never doubt why so many of her characters are willing to burn at the stake. (Her interest in religion and madness comes in handy here.) But, for the pragmatist Cromwell, whom she carefully portrays as being allergic to ideological extremes, such gestures are repugnant. “They deserve each other, these mules that pass for men,” he muses apropos of More and More’s great enemy, the Protestant William Tyndale, whose insistence on translating the Bible into English ended up sending him to the pyre.

There’s something familiar about the cruelly efficient machinery of state intimidation that Cromwell is shown operating so brilliantly. King Henry emerges as an all too recognizable type, a vain and unbalanced autocrat whose dangerously mercurial desires have to be managed by his skillful minister. And Cromwell often puts you in mind not so much of Machiavelli’s cool Realpolitik in the sixteenth century as of Stalin’s warped jurisprudence in the twentieth. “He needs guilty men,” Mantel’s hero thinks, as he hounds Anne’s alleged lovers into confessing. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”

And yet Mantel slyly works to keep him sympathetic. (She’s not the first historical novelist to fall for her subject; older readers might think of Mary Renault and Alexander the Great.) To the end, Cromwell is presented as a flawed idealist. He is a distant cousin of one of the characters in “A Change of Climate,” who ruefully observes that “we set out with high ideals. . . . The things we wanted have not happened.”

Taken together, those first two volumes function as a dark diptych, a portrait of an increasingly haunted man who finds it ever more difficult to extricate himself from the moral implications of his sophisticated political maneuvering. From other things, too: he occasionally suspects that, as high as he has risen, he may be more like his thuggish father than he likes to admit—another past that proves inescapable.

“Bring Up the Bodies” ends in the summer of 1536, just after Anne’s beheading and Henry’s marriage to his third wife, Jane Seymour. That leaves the short but eventful remainder of Cromwell’s life still to be narrated. He was executed in July, 1540, for treason and heresy, after his enemies among the old nobility succeeded in convincing the ever more paranoid Henry that he was aiming to depose him and take the throne.

“The Mirror and the Light” does cover those years, but the tightly symmetrical trajectories that organized the first two volumes and generated their morals and meanings have gone. This book has to embrace a concatenation of major events, any one of which could be the matter of an entire novel. We get the popular uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace; the brief queenship of Jane Seymour, the birth of her son, the future Edward VI, and her death soon afterward; the selection of the German princess Anne of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife, a match that was urged by Cromwell in part because of his desire to move England closer to the Protestant German states—and whose failure was to doom Cromwell himself. (Some things even he couldn’t manipulate: the King found Anne physically distasteful, and the marriage was annulled.) Henry’s unhappiness with the whole affair was a turning point in his relations with his chief minister, whose fall from power occupies the final section of the novel.

No surprise, then, that the new book—seven hundred and fifty-four pages long, complete with a seven-page list of the dramatis personae—is Mantel’s longest yet. Unfortunately, it’s beyond even her skill to hold these disparate happenings together, and the result is a bloated and only occasionally captivating work.

To be sure, this huge canvas, expertly painted as always, offers many of the pleasures you’ve come to expect of Mantel and her Cromwell books. These include stretches of sumptuous prose; something about the Tudor milieu has brought greater amplitude and gorgeousness to Mantel’s style. Throughout, there are swoony passages that—like certain Dutch paintings of the century after Cromwell’s—exult in cataloguing the material richness of a society newly confident in itself: the food and the fabrics, the jewels and the spices, the meats, the tapestries, the wines. As the narrative of Cromwell’s final years moves closer to its inevitable conclusion, and as he pauses ever more frequently to consider his achievements, this opulent style comes to color Mantel’s evocation of his autumnal thoughts:

He too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say, is this story mine . . . ?

Throughout “The Mirror and the Light,” you feel the effort of the author’s attempts to stop that story sliding from her grip. A structure implicit in the history of Cromwell’s final years is one that literature has loved to exploit, and Mantel tries hard to make it work. If, in the first two books, the protagonist’s trajectory was an upward one, the arc in the third is the old Greek one that goes from hubris to nemesis. Although it’s highly unlikely that Cromwell ever intended to depose Henry, as his accusers maintained, Mantel effectively suggests the way in which, as time passed and Henry became increasingly erratic, his minister may well have become dangerously overconfident. (By the end of the trilogy, the King—“a man of great endowments, lacking only in consistency, reason and sense”—has come to embody the irrational forces that Cromwell has always tried to combat and that Mantel has always probed.)

One way to think of the book’s title is, indeed, to see it as illustrating a fatal confusion: Cromwell, the mirror, has mistaken himself for the light, which can only be Henry. Again and again, Cromwell will let slip a remark that reveals the perilous delusion that he is indispensable to his prince. “I should not have let the king get in my way,” he remarks of some plan that had come undone. “My lord,” a shocked associate retorts, “the king is not in our way. He is our way.” Such offhand remarks will come back to haunt him, twisted and used against him just as he has twisted the innocent words of others.

The hubris theme is too intermittent, too submerged beneath the exhausting accumulation of events and details, to make things cohere. Other tactics fall short, too. As the book reaches its climax, there is a feverish increase of flashbacks to Cromwell’s childhood—many of which, such as recollections of his father’s vicious beatings, repeat incidents familiar from the previous installments, presumably in order to create echoes and parallels that will give some kind of shape to this mass. (There are even ghosts: Thomas More hovers, as does a talkative Wolsey. The past is never past.) But the gesture fails, and the repetitions feel merely repetitive.

By the time you get to Cromwell’s execution—a brilliantly imagined moment, and perhaps the best single scene here—the incidents and details, all no doubt with some basis in history, have overwhelmed any discernible pattern. I found my attention wandering more than once as I made my way through an elaborate description of a court entertainment, a subplot involving an anonymous gift to Cromwell of a leopard, and a visit to baby Elizabeth, who’s cranky because she’s teething; and even started to wonder—a thought unimaginable during my reading of the first two books—whether this particular historical figure really merits nearly two thousand pages of fiction.

Toward the end of “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” there’s a charged moment in which Isabel, the social worker, learns that someone wants to write a novel based on the disturbed Muriel’s case file; astonished, she wonders aloud how and why anyone would want to do so. “But it’s not a story,” she protests, “it’s just what people do. It’s just a record of what they do.” History, too, in one view, is the record of what people have done: Richard Crookback, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The final installment of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy is a reminder that a history is not the same as a story. I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.

But, for all the additional events it relates, nothing in “The Mirror and the Light” is really new—or, I should say, really “novel.” The great quantity of matter here will no doubt satisfy fans of both the Tudors and Mantel; but since when was that the point? If an author has told a tale well, given it a firm shape and delineated its themes, brought its hero sufficiently to life to leave an indelible impression, she’s done her job. Everything else is just words, words, words. ♦

A previous version of this article misstated the media company for which the “The Tudors” was produced.

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Book Review: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

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.

England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. Amazon.co.uk

Wolf Hall was one of the first audio books I purchased… and it was – and remains – gorgeous! But I had listened to it some years ago. Back in 2010 to be precise, before this blog existed! And it is a novel I have cited on occasion on various other posts over the years which felt weird without a review to link it to. So that, plus the release of The Mirror and the Light tempted me to do something I almost never do: a re-read.

And it is a massive testament to the novel that it warranted and repaid that re-read!

From the opening pages the world of sixteenth century England leapt from the page! The grime and brutality of that exquisite opening scene as Cromwell cowers before his father’s boot is as vivid and gripping as anything I have read – ever!

So now get up.’ Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father’s first effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut. ‘So now get up!’ Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next.

That stitching and twine and leather that fills the imagination!

And the next chapter juxtaposes that with richness and luxury of Wolsey’s chambers where the Cardinal stands before the tapestry of King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba – whose image recalls for Cromwell Anselma, a girl her knew in Antwerp. And the Cardinal is

dressed not in his everyday scarlet, but in blackish purple and fine white lace: like a humble bishop. His height impresses; his belly, which should in justice belong to a more sedentary man, is merely another princely aspect of his being, and on it, confidingly, he often rests a large, white, beringed hand.

These characters live and breathe as few characters do in books. They are exceptionally well crafted as Mantel grafts flesh on the historical bones, performs some alchemy to turn history into characterisation.

That alchemy comes from many many wonderful features of the novel. Cromwell’s unfailing expertise whether in the legal courtroom or the Royal Court, whether in business or in war could have been overbearing. If he were merely the character that More describes

‘Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,’ says Thomas More, ‘and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’

he would not have the presence that he does. Because Mantel manages to balance this so well with a delicate sense of vulnerability and loss. Wolsey felt like a figure from another age in contrast and yet the relationship between the two was palpable and his loss heart breaking. In fact many characters in the Court felt like something from a different feudal age (I loved the description of Norfolk rattling when he walked because of all his relics) being left behind as Cromwell and his brethren strode into the future.

The minor characters – Cromwell’s extended household for example – were as vivid and lively as the statesmen – the Cromwells and Wolseys, Katherines and Henrys and the oh-so-many Thomases – often undercutting the “shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities” with simple practical knowledge such as knowing that a certain emerald ring was being crafted when the emerald shattered.

In fact, Liz Wykys, Cromwell’s wife, was a stand out character for me from the first moment we met her, greeting her travel worn husband returning from Yorkshire with

Lizzie is still up. When she hears the servants let him in, she comes out with his little dog under her arm, fighting and squealing. ‘Forget where you lived?’ He sighs…. ‘You’re sweeter to look at than the cardinal,’ he says. ‘That’s the smallest compliment a woman ever received.’ ‘And I’ve been working on it all the way from Yorkshire.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ah well!’

For all Cromwell’s wit and wisdom, experience and cunning, Liz served as a wonderful foil able to hold her own in conversation and in the reader’s imagination. Indeed, it is in Cromwell’s household that I found the heart of the novel. In his love for Liz and his children, his care and concern for the young men he adopts into his household – Rafe Sadler, Richard Williams, Christophe – was wonderful. The scents and tastes and sounds – the vividness of that household were exceptionally crafted, and the relationships between them were so tender, rendered often in a combination of naturalistic dialogue and Cromwell’s internal thoughts. One example from Anne, his daughter goes

‘May I choose my husband?’ ‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point. ‘Then I choose Rafe.’ For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend.

And Cromwell’s pain in the death of his wife and children is extraordinary – captured in simple brutal language without a hint of sentimentality and all the more tragic for that

He remembers the morning: the damp sheets, her damp forehead. Liz, he thinks, didn’t you fight? If I had seen your death coming, I would have taken him and beaten in his death’s head; I would have crucified him against the wall.

The political progress of the novel is, of course, familiar: we pick up Henry VIII’s reign as he – like a good Catholic – is seeking dispensation from the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she had in fact consummated her first marriage with Henry’s brother Arthur. And we all know the story of his infatuation with Anne Boleyn which lies behind it. And Anne in this book is a crafty and cunning young woman, both mercurial and calculating.

The difficulty with such familiar historical matter is that it can rob it of tension – we know who survives and who falls to the plotting – and it can rob it of structure. For me, that first problem was not an issue in the least, but the second was a little. It felt as if Mantel may have been struggling to find the right place to end the novel: Wolsey’s downfall? The King’s marriage? Boleyn’s coronation? The decision to close with Thomas More’s execution for me was not a big enough moment: neither the friendship between More and Cromwell, nor the tensions between them quite warranted the narrative weight given to More’s death. It was, after all, just one in a long succession of them.

What I Liked

The characterisation was exquisite at all levels within the book – a genuine masterclass in character building with not a word wasted or out of place. There are too many favourite characters in here: obviously Cromwell but also Wolsey, Liz Cromwell,
The family at Austen Friars was wonderful and warm, loving despite their terrible losses and tragedies which genuinely moved me to tears, especially the deaths of Anne and Grace.
The dialogue was nuanced, playful and utterly authentic – thankfully without any attempt to great faux Early Modern English dialect
Mantel’s historical research was simultaneously incredibly deep but lightly worn, guiding the language and imagery and sensory details in a wonderfully delicate way.
Mantel’s language was simply sublime throughout

What Could Have Been Different

Structurally, the novel felt a little episodic at times, but then so is history! I felt that the second novel in the series, Bring Up The Bodies benefitted from a sharper narrative focus: the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Thomas More lacked the presence for me to really carry the final sections of the novel – he was neither heroic and likeable enough, nor beastly enough but a combination of both, which sums up us all at the end of the day, doesn’t it? His death carried pathos but not much weight for me.

Characters:

Plot / Pace:

Worldbuilding:

Page Count: 674 pages

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Date: 4th March 2010

Available: Amazon , Fourth Estate

Published by The Book Lover's Sanctuary

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[…] was I excited for this? I adored the first two books in Mantel’s Wolf Hall series – the sense of time and place, the […]

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Book Review :: Wolf Hall

Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009, Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel’s account of part of King Henry VIII’s reign in England through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – a man often stereotyped as being no more than a political ladder-climber. The years covered are book-ended by the banishment and subsequent death of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and the execution of Thomas More, which appropriately draws the reader’s attention to the context of religion during this portion of Henry’s term.

I am not as well versed on this portion of England’s history – famous as it is – and experiencing this as a book on tape, I kept finding myself having to stop and consciously remember who all the players were. I would have benefited from having a cheat sheet available of the title, position and relationships of all the characters.

Other than that, I really enjoyed Wolf Hall . This was an incredible time in church history as well as the monarchy, and I thought Mantel did a great job in her portrayal of discussions of topics that had such weighty consequences. I’m currently reading Founding Brothers , and at the end of the first chapter the author makes the point that there are times in our history when lapses of character can be overlooked or absorbed into history, but there are other times when the stakes are so high and there is so much on the line that nothing is more important than integrity and character. (This is paraphrased of course.) To me, Wolf Hall describes just such a time for England and the church.

Along those lines, one of my observations that became abundantly clear – and perhaps this was Mantel’s point in humanizing Cromwell – men in the court of Henry VIII, or perhaps during this period, didn’t and couldn’t survive by being purely self-serving. They had to be, at a minimum, relationally savvy and more likely, widely respected for their wise counsel. Cromwell was both of these things.

Tudor history has been enjoying a bit of a spotlight in pop culture for several years now, and this well-researched account should appeal to readers who thrive on the topic. However, it is the expertly crafted characterization that makes Wolf Hall an excellent read for a broader literary audience.

Book Review: ‘Wolf Hall’

At the book’s center: Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless blacksmith’s son who rose to power under Henry VIII because of his intelligence, cunning and work ethic. . . . Mantel’s novel is less about Henry’s sex life and more about power: how to get it, wield it, keep it, particularly if you—like the low-born Cromwell—lived in a merciless world ruled by the rich and titled. Cromwell usually is presented as a bully utterly lacking scruples, but Mantel’s Cromwell is a sympathetic character modern readers will understand. Wolf is like a Tudor-era version of American Gangster , with Cromwell as Denzel Washington.

Read review here .

–S. T. Karnick

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Short Story Review: Wolf Hall by Harper Fox [Audiobook]
Wolf Hall : Hilary Mantel : 9780008381691 : Blackwell's
Book Review: Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies PBS Masterpiece E-Book Bundle
Wolf Hall: The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 1 : Hilary Mantel, Ben Miles, W
Book Review: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

COMMENTS

Review: 'Wolf Hall,' by Hilary Mantel
WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel | Review first published Oct. 29, 2009. "Try always," says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in "Wolf Hall," Hilary Mantel's fictional portrait of Henry VIII's ...
Book Review
Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us. Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. "Wolf Hall" has epic scale but ...
WOLF HALL
The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction. Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor. 5. Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009. ISBN: 978--8050-8068-1.
Book Review
Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. "Wolf Hall" has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator's day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society — not of a medieval fief ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel book review
In this review. WOLF HALL. 651pp. Fourth Estate. £18.99. Hilary Mantel. Henry VIII had six wives and at least as many Thomases: Wolsey, More, Cranmer, Cromwell, Howard (Third Duke of Norfolk), Wriothesley (pronounced "Risley", eventually First Earl of Southampton). Dismissed, beheaded, survived (to be burnt at the stake by Henry's ...
REVIEW: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
In doing a little research for this review, I discovered that Wolf Hall has been criticized in some quarters for a lack of historical accuracy and for being "anti-Catholic.". On the first charge, it's hard to know how to feel - Wolf Hall, is after all, fiction, and most of the instances of supposed inaccuracy cited seemed to have to do ...
'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel, a Biographical Novel on Thomas Cromwell
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel [A Review]
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel [A Review] The huge interest and success of Wolf Hall showed that the world is still far from done with the Tudors and appetite for them remains unsated. England in the early 16 th century is simmering with an uneasy peace. Far better than the bitter War of the Roses period, the Tudor hold of the crown is nevertheless ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: book review
This review was originally published in April 2009. Wolf Hall went on to win both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. X Icon
Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. (...) Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable." - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review "Mantel's characters do not speak sixteenth-century English.
Book Marks reviews of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Ms. Mantel takes an extremely contemporary approach to Cromwell by appreciating his toughness, his keen political instincts, his financial acumen and his intimate knowledge of the workings ...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: Summary and reviews
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty ...
Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall is a 2009 historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire.Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More.
Hubris and Delusion at the End of Hilary Mantel's Tudor Trilogy
The publication, in 2009, of "Wolf Hall," whose protagonist was Henry VIII's brilliant consigliere, Thomas Cromwell, and of its sequel, "Bring Up the Bodies," in 2012—a series that ...
Review: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall is an epic historical fiction novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn. Cromwell, son of a lowly Blacksmith, rose to prominence and figured out how to make the king the head of the church in England (instead of the Pope) so that the king could divorce his wife and marry Anne.
Book Review: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall was one of the first audio books I purchased… and it was - and remains - gorgeous! But I had listened to it some years ago. Back in 2010 to be precise, before this blog existed! And it is a novel I have cited on occasion on various other posts over the years which felt weird without a review to link it to.
What do readers think of Wolf Hall?
I enjoyed the challenging writing style as well as the story of Cromwell--and it really is Cromwell's story, not so much as a stream-of-consciousness but as a stream-of-life. It's a book to be savored--many times. Canadian Chickadee. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I found this book exasperating in the extreme.
Book Review: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with ...
Book Review :: Wolf Hall
Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009, Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel's account of part of King Henry VIII's reign in England through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall. by Hilary Mantel. Publication Date: August 31, 2010. Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction. Paperback: 604 pages. Publisher: Picador. ISBN-10: 0312429983. ISBN-13: 9780312429980. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy.
Book Review: 'Wolf Hall'
The newly released historical novel Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, sounds very interesting. Winner of the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall is set during the reign of English king Henry VIII and concentrates on the fascinating political intrigue of the time and the lessons to be learned from it.. Keynotes: At the book's center: Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless blacksmith's son who rose to power under ...