Reviewed by Susan Price
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| 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel |
‘Wolf Hall’ and 'Bring Up The Bodies', by Hilary Mantel
hardly need my tin whistle to pipe their praise; but I’m going to toot
anyway - and at greater than usual length - because at the time of writing there are no other
books I want
to praise so much.
I downloaded Wolf Hall to my kindle and
there it sat, for two months. I’d
heard rumours that it was good, but, well – it was about Tudor politics
and Anne Boleyn. I’d been there before.
Besides, wasn’t it written in the present tense? I’d read other things in that tense and been
dismayed by their clumsiness.
But from the moment I started Wolf Hall, I was away with
Thomas Cromwell.
Now, I’m a hardened reader.
This makes me difficult to please. I
realise that most of the time I read with a commentary going on at the back of
my mind: ‘I’d change that word; I’d cut that; I’d rewrite that sentence; I don’t
think that character would do that…’
I realise this because, while I engulfed Wolf Hall, this
commentary was silent. Mantel’s writing is
effortless, beautiful, expert. I
questioned nothing.
I experienced that
pleasure which is quite rare for me these days – the hankering for a book and
its world. I was always eager to get
back to it. I often clicked back a few
pages to read a passage again, simply because it was so beautiful. When I saw from
the bar at the bottom of the kindle page that the end was close, I rationed my
reading, to make it last.
We are promised a third book – at the end of which Cromwell,
presumably, will get it in the neck. I
bite my nails. Why didn’t I wait until
the third was published, and then I could have read all of them, one after
another?
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| Thomas Cromwell |
When I think of Mantel’s achievement with these books, I am
awed. First, the research. I faint in coils at the thought of the
reading necessary to amass such detail of social manners, clothing, furnishing,
politics, religious schisms, climate, and the hullaballoo of daily life in the
early 1500s.
But then, to pluck from all that only the few details she
needs: and nothing more.
A biography would have taken no more research – and Mantel
goes beyond that. She fictionalises it all:
which means she dresses in the facts, goes inside them and recreates Cromwell
from the inside – and every scene he takes part in. Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Moore,
Cramner – we see, hear and understand all of them as Thomas Cromwell sees,
hears and understands them. We see the
countryside, feel its cold and damp, its warm summer days. We smell the stinks of the streets, the
perfume of spices, we witness executions… It is all completely convincing and
absorbing, and the amount of thought, concentration, imagining, rewriting and
sheer hard work this represents is heroic.
But more still. The prose is beautiful. Its cadences slide through your mind like
silk, until some sharp point purposely sticks you like a hidden needle. Words are worked. Why is the book called Wolf Hall?
Because
the family seat of Jane Seymour is called ‘Wolf Hall.’ Not a single
scene is set there, but we are directed, ironically, to Anne Boleyn’s
downfall even at the time of her
greatest triumph.
Also, ‘men are wolves to men’, and these aristocrats, within
whose orbit Cromwell finds himself, are those very wolves: murdering for their
own political advantage and selling their daughters.
Bring Up The Bodies famously opens with Cromwell hunting,
with birds named after his own, dead, daughters. ‘His children are falling from the sky… each
with a blood-filled gaze… Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her
claws…These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now
transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on
the upper currents of the air. They pity
no one… When they look down they see nothing but their prey… they see a
flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.’
This reminds us of the family Cromwell mourns: but is also
the world-view of the people for whom he works.
It is possibly the view of Cromwell himself. It’s even, possibly, the view of the dead,
and of God, who has gathered them to Himself.
(And although I have severely trimmed the above quote, the beauty of the
prose, its lovely rhythms, survives.)
The book is far from what I half-feared: another trot
through Tudor history, as made familiar by many romantic novels and television
series. This Anne Boleyn is no romantic heroine, no damsel in distress: she is
sharp as a knife, intelligent, relentlessly calculating and
self-interested. After all, look at the
family she came from and her upbringing.
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| 'Bring Up The Bodies' by Hilary Mantel |
Her brother, George, is a
spoiled, self-regarding, nasty
little ****. Mantel even suggests that
the incest charge may not have been the trumpery most accounts assume it
was. Anne and George Boleyn were reared
apart, hardly meeting before adulthood, and siblings today who meet only
as
adults often feel a powerful erotic attraction. And Anne was desperate
for a son, the only thing that would maintain her position, while George
was desperate to maintain his position as the king's brother-in-law.
Mantel’s Thomas Moore is not saintly, but a vain,
self-centred man who makes a pet of one daughter, while routinely insulting the
others and his wife. His urbane manner
masks a furious hatred of anyone who dares to understand God other than as
Moore does. The only good Protestant is
a dead, burned one.
It's Cromwell who is usually portrayed as ruthless and brutal, even
if intelligent and talented. Mantel
makes him a humorous, compassionate man, whose wide-ranging life and enquiring
intelligence have given him vast experience and knowledge, together with a
sharp insight into the nature and motives of others. This enables him to outplay them in the Tudor
court’s lethal political chess games.
His
violent, neglectful childhood has made him sympathetic to the poor and abandoned. Large numbers of the poor are fed from his
kitchens every day while his house is full of orphans and apprentices, who
flourish in his care. Mantel gives him a
dry, dead-pan wit, and makes him loveable.
He is also ruthless, when required, and vengeful. He sees himself as a man who has a job to do,
with the tools available. Politics as
the art of the possible.
But if he can spare
somebody’s life, he will; and he considers that, despite his deep dislike of
the man, he gave Moore every chance to evade the death
sentence. It was Moore’s own obstinate
insistence on being right that saw him executed.
If it’s not possible to do the job without a death, then
Cromwell will ensure that the scaffold is erected in time and the straw spread
to soak up the blood, before returning to his loving household and dogs.
Is this a truthful representation of Cromwell, or of the
other historical personages? Who
knows? Mantel herself says that she
offers her books as one possible interpretation of the facts. The books read almost as an illustration of
the truth that we can never fully understand other people. We can observe what they do, and what they
say, but when we try to deduce, from these observations, their thoughts and
emotions, all we can do is make an interpretation, filtered through our own
emotions, thoughts and experience. It
may be accurate, or wildly inaccurate, but we will never know which.
And people change. It
may be that the books offer Cromwell’s own interpretation of himself – a good
guy really, despite all he’s done. We
all put the best possible spin on ourselves.
I think there are hints, towards the end of Bring Up The Bodies that
Cromwell’s good-guy self-image is faltering – another reason why I look forward
keenly to the third book.
I read one review of Wolf Hall which began, ‘I hesitate to
use the word ‘masterpiece’…’
Well, I
refuse to use the word, ‘masterpiece.’
These books are by a Mistress: in short, works ‘in which
the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language."
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| Susan Price |
Susan Price is the award winning author of 'The Ghost Drum' and 'The Sterkarm Handshake.'
Her website is here
Her blog can be found here
She is also a member of the Authors Electric blog.
