Wolf Hall

I'm infatuated. Well, that's a strange word to use for WOLF HALL and Hilary Mantel, one of the sharpest, most thorough historical fiction writers I've ever encountered. But I AM infatuated--with her prose, which is absolutely the most brilliant writing I've read in years. I love the sentences in this book. And when every sentence you flow through is sheer delight, that adds up to a delightful book. Not to mention the faster-than-lighting pacing of dialogue and story, the complicated character which is Thomas Cromwell, the quirky, close third-person point of view which allows you into a stunning mind, the tension of knowing just enough about Henry VIII to anticipate disaster but not enough to know exactly how disaster unfolded...in other words, add to those gorgeous sentences a thrilling plot, and I can't put the book down.

If that's not enough, Mantel also explores the theological tensions of the day: The heresy of Martin Luther, the waning of the pope's influence in England, the Bible's translation into English, and the beginnings of the Church of England. The church's corruption becomes reason for the king to occupy church property. At first, Mantel makes these conflicts deeply personal; we see Cromwell as a faithful but smart, questioning reformer who acts from his faith. As he gets closer to the crown, Mantel neglects this aspect of his being. But this is my only criticism of an otherwise exceptional novel.

I could pull a paragraph from anywhere in the book and you'd be wowed. Here's one from the end, referring to the heresies of Thomas More:

They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of Moore's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

AHHH..... ( )

You do get over the whole 'him' and 'he' thing that so many people have mentioned after a while, although it's a good few hundred pages before all those sentences and paragraphs starting in that fashion, cease being mental tripwires. It's like some mental equivalent of running through dense woods or undergrowth: You try to get into your usual rhythm but every few paces there's another one to trip you up, leaving you mentally flailing on the floor in shock and confusion. Or at least skipping back to the previous page to try and figure out who this mysterious guy is whose just crashed into the scene.

Once the mind hurdles are mastered (remember: 'HE' is almost always Cromwell) the book settles down into a nice piece of historical fiction. And nice it is. Not bad, but not great, nice. I have to admit I struggle to see what all the excitement is about. Wolf Hall to me just seems another good example of it's genre, nothing exceptional.
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You do get over the whole 'him' and 'he' thing that so many people have mentioned after a while, although it's a good few hundred pages before all those sentences and paragraphs starting in that fashion, cease being mental tripwires. It's like some mental equivalent of running through dense woods or undergrowth: You try to get into your usual rhythm but every few paces there's another one to trip you up, leaving you mentally flailing on the floor in shock and confusion. Or at least skipping back to the previous page to try and figure out who this mysterious guy is whose just crashed into the scene.

Once the mind hurdles are mastered (remember: 'HE' is almost always Cromwell) the book settles down into a nice piece of historical fiction. And nice it is. Not bad, but not great, nice. I have to admit I struggle to see what all the excitement is about. Wolf Hall to me just seems another good example of it's genre, nothing exceptional.
( )

Alternately brilliant and frustrating.
Like the other Mantel books i've read, I loved parts of this, but found it often baggy and confusing in its characterization...perhaps it would have felt different if I knew more about english history, but although I like her writing style--very immediate and vividly descriptive--her insistence on only using pronouns, made it REALLY hard to understand who was talking when, a lot of the time! Basically I really liked the beginning, and am glad I got to the end, because that's also very good (Thomas More's death), but I had to skim quite a bit in the last half to get there! ( )

Alright, I love me some Tudors but I could not get into this one. It could have been the audiobook and I may have enjoyed it more if I went the print route, possibly. But after 4 hours of listening I just wasn't looking forward to the next 19 hours.