A Startling Achievement

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are many reviews of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall on Goodreads, ranging from the one star disappointment of some readers to those like me who rate Wolf Hall as a five star 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. Thomas Cromwell is the focus of Mantel’s loving attention for more than six hundred pages. Mantel uses her literary skills to put the meat on the bones of a tumultuous period of history when the son of an abusive, alcoholic blacksmith, Thomas rose to become for eight crucial years in the 1530s the most powerful political figure in Henry VIII’s England, the man who orchestrated the King’s momentous break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the seizure of their wealth, and the execution for treason of Sir Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, the Carthusian monks, and many, many others.

Mantel’s novel takes Cromwell only to 1535, the moment at which he ascends to the height of his power. A vigorous fifty-year-old, he has risen to great wealth; his enemy Thomas More has just gone to the scaffold; the King, who has broken with Rome and married Anne Boleyn, holds him in the utmost confidence. It would have been easy enough for Mantel to gesture toward the future that we—in historical hindsight—know lies ahead, but she does nothing of the kind. Instead the novel ends with the tirelessly calculating and energetic Cromwell charting the King’s travels, as if in a board game, and planning that rarest of events for himself, a few days off: “I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?” That’s it. A holiday. He will spend it at Wolf Hall, the house of the Seymour family. And therein, I am sure, the opening of the sequel Bring Up The Bodies is to be found. It’s on my ‘to read’ list.

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