Words&Dirt

Summary:

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a fascinating, impressive, and frustrating work of historical fiction. Mantel provides an intimate and meticulous examination of Thomas Cromwell‘s rise to power, showing how he gained favor and influence as an advisor to England’s King Henry VIII during the 1520s and 1530s. The text is packed with vivid historical details and offers brief moments of literary flair, but it is also needlessly dense, lengthy, and often confusing to read. The themes and characters in Wolf Hall are impactful, but structurally it stumbles in a fashion unbecoming of its sly and supple protagonist.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I will be the first to admit that I am far from Mantel’s target audience. I’m not a medieval history buff, nor particularly knowledgable about history in general, and I don’t care much for political dramas––especially ones that take place within monarchic power structures. But my father-in-law bought us beautiful hardcover copies of Mantel’s entire Cromwell trilogy, and I am a sucker for physically appealing books. As much as I enjoyed certain aspects of this novel, I was also closer to abandoning Wolf Hall than I have been with any book in a long time.
• As other reviewers have commented, the main obstacle to enjoying Wolf Hall is its bloated and bewildering structure. Mantel makes little effort to carry her audience along, and seems to intentionally subvert her reader’s understanding throughout the text. Her imprecise use of pronouns adds nothing special and feels like a stylistic choice that ostensibly “elevates” the writing when really it just makes it more confusing. And even with the aid of a full cast of characters and royal family tree references at the beginning, most readers will probably struggle to become familiar with vast number of characters, not to mention the intricate web of relationships between them.
• All of that said, Wolf Hall does contain absolutely jaw-dropping pieces of prose, some of which I have included below. Page for page I disliked reading this book, but I eagerly add that Mantel is an extremely talented writer.
• My favorite aspect of Wolf Hall is how it posits Cromwell as a driving force behind the social and political progress that took place during Henry VIII’s turbulent break from Roman Catholic Church and subsequent formation of the Church of England. Cromwell was not of noble lineage, and rose to levels of power that hitherto had only been available to aristocrats. Despite the fact that he achieves this by being cunning and unmistakably brutal, there is little doubt that the Western world is better off as a result of his position as a dirty-handed midwife of meritocracy.
• Mantel makes no effort to conceal Cromwell’s darker qualities, but she also does a wonderful job of humanizing him. Wolf Hall poignantly reveals how abuse, tragedy, and grief pervaded Cromwell’s personal life, as well as how he crafted himself into a strong leader and compassionate mentor for his family and political allies.
• This book exhausted me, but it was also more rewarding than I expected. For now, I will not continue with the series, but may pick it back up in the future.

Favorite Quotes:

That was the way of the world: a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings which have worked themselves into flesh. (76)

That soft hiss and whisper, of stone destroying itself; that distant sound of walls sliding, of plaster crumbling, of rubble crashing on to fragile human skulls? That is the sound of the roof of Christendom, falling on the people below. (196)

For a second he understands it; then he doesn’t. He stands by the window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before. (205)

It is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. (359)

When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn. (483)

He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted. Here at the close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world. (522)

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. (610)

I once had every hope…The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one’s solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain––the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?…I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn’t have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do. (635)

The trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist. (649)

Rating: 7/10