Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall won the British author her first Booker Prize, and the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, earned her her second a few years later, with the two novels also becoming a six-part BBC miniseries under the former’s title. Wolf Hall is an achievement, an incredibly immersive, precise work of historical fiction that, unlike so many reimaginations that feel untrue to their times, puts the reader completely into the mode and culture of its time period. It’s a long go, at 600 pages and somewhat dense with scenes that set mood rather than advancing the plot, and Mantel has some stylistic quirks that made reading it more difficult than it needed to be, but on balance the journey was worth the effort.

Wolf Hall is the story of Thomas Cromwell, with a brief prologue on his youth but primarily focused on his time in the royal court, advising King Henry VIII during the period when Hank was trying to divorce his wife Katherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The hitch, of course, is that in the 1500s the Catholic Church did not recognize divorce – oh, wait, they don’t recognize it now, good job fellas – yet they were still the quasi-official faith of England until the King broke with them in 1533 over this very issue. These were fraught times politically; the price of exclusion or expulsion from the King’s circle could be imprisonment in the Tower of London or execution, often after torture. Cromwell was successful at navigating these waters, both in terms of saving his own hide (during the time covered by this novel, at least) and pushing his personal agendas, often involving personal enmities against the likes of Thomas More or Stephen Gardiner.

Mantel is operating in tricky territory because these are all real historical figures and there’s a fair amount of existing material on their actions, but she manages to create compelling, credible characters out of many of them, notably Cromwell and the King. Even secondary characters like More, who is insufferable in his own idiosyncratic way, become interesting in Mantel’s depiction because she gives them enough depth to make them more than stock figures. It’s really the Cromwell and Henry show, though, with Cromwell the clear lead for multiple reasons, not least is how Mantel takes his own personal sorrows – the death of his wife and several of his children in the still unknown epidemic of the “sweating sickness” that hit England in many summers over a 60-plus year period. (Wikipedia cites one hypothesis that it was a type of hantavirus, a form of infection largely unknown until an outbreak in the American Southwest 1993.) Mantel manages to incorporate that thoroughly into Cromwell’s character and inner monologues without relying on it too overtly or allowing it to become his dominant feature.

The book is long, by which I mean it’s long even for 600 pages – it’s wordy and Mantel tends towards Dickensian descriptions. There are scenes here that are entertaining enough to read but don’t need to be in the book; they’re superfluous to the plot, even though they fit with the rest of the material. Mantel also rarely refers to her protagonist by name; Cromwell is usually just “he,” or is quoted without any pronouns attached for attribution. If you see a “he” without a nearby name to which it might connect, then that’s Cromwell. It’s a clear stylistic choice on Mantel’s part, and I found it incredibly annoying, because no matter how often she did it I could not get to a point where I would read an unattached “he” and assume, by default, it was Cromwell. In scenes with multiple speakers – which occurs frequently – reading the dialogue without Cromwell’s quotes tagged with his name was like listening to an old vinyl record with a small scratch on it. I often had to re-read a few lines once I realized Cromwell was in the conversation and hadn’t put his quotes into his ‘voice’ in my imagination.

There’s also too much mention of various couplings and proposed marriages among tertiary characters, exacerbated by the similarities in so many of their names. Mantel’s hands were tied on the latter point, but I’m also not sure if we needed details on the various schemes and affairs among non-core characters – even Cromwell’s children and wards, whose acts may have affected him but didn’t matter to the plot of this particular book.

I’ll certainly continue to Bring Up the Bodies, especially since it’s shorter, since I enjoyed Mantel’s storytelling and her prose isn’t actually a problem even though it’s not the style I prefer. (The third book, which I assume will move directly on to the shortlist for the Booker Prize, is due out in March.) I’m curious if any of you have seen the miniseries, which boasted a very impressive cast and earned great reviews and multiple awards.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.