Wolf Hall

Sometime at the end of 2010, I read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I began with a reason as simple as curiosity. I wanted to see what Mantel had added to the already wide-ranging canon of literature devoted to the subject of Tudor history. By the time I embarked upon this book, I had already struggled with The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, a book too steeped in distorted sympathy for my particular liking, and watched its movie rendition. I had also begun watching the acclaimed television series, The Tudors, in which Jonathan Rhys Meyers is very delectable (and that's all there is to be said about it). Years ago, I had watched and read A Man for All Seasons, which I thought beautiful and sensitive. During my MA, I did considerable research on Tudor history (although I really concentrated more on Elizabeth I than Henry VIII). Still, so much has been said of this period that I could not help wondering what Mantel could possibly have to add. As it turned out, a lot.

In her sweeping account of Thomas Cromwell’s life, Mantel somehow humanises a man we have loved to hate, a man who has hitherto been characterised in history, fiction, theatre and cinema as the manipulative, self-serving and ambitious engineer of the historic break-away of the English Church from Rome. The portrayal is sympathetic, persuasive and cunning. For me, this is historic fiction as it is defined: not a distortion of fact but an attribution of motivation to fact. The author weaves context into history, lacing her writing with sharp, witty dialogue and a tautness of prose. In the London Review of Books, Colin Burrows writes, 'The result is less a historical novel than an alternative history novel.' It is this and so much more.

Often, Mantel's writing borders on the tedious, populated too densely with description and obliqueness. This is particularly true in the cases of her laboured use of the present tense and her wicked and purposeful ambiguity with pronouns. And yet, paradoxically, the book is eminently readable. One cannot help laughing out loud at the irresistible wit that peppers the dialogue, so easy on the ears, so charming and vivid and undeniably sexy. Sometimes, amidst all the indelicate impudence, she is startlingly, staggeringly poetic.

Mantel has created her own syntax: it is as absurdly modern as her hero and as timeworn as the age he lived in, a gentle mix of contemporary verbiage and early-modern slang. The idiom it adheres to is one that is entirely her own. Mantel teases the reader incessantly with devilishly non-conformist rhetoric and her refusal to bow down to convention or stereotype and yet, sometimes does so, especially when she is least expected to.

The redemption of Cromwell is romantic, but still problematic. Her depiction of Cromwell as the man who heralded the English Reformation makes for a likely (and likeable) historical character, but often, Mantel pushes the point of his being an enlightened, almost modern, revolutionary. He is so sophisticated, so intelligent, so well ahead of his times, that it is hard to even place him in the context we must place him in. On one level, the novel simply seeks to fill in the blanks of a history written by victors; at the same time, it creates a pageantry of sometimes unbelievable political intrigue warped by extraordinary motivations. The book is a saucy drama made of history. In its characterisation, which depends on the astonishingly effective strategy of telling rather than showing, it is as manipulative as Cromwell himself is believed to be, playing on the modern reader's natural allegiance to reformation and enlightenment.

Still, the book is so arresting, encompassing drama with history, imagination with reality, sympathy with unsentimentality and originality with a wicked sense of pastiche, that the it becomes a vivid, compelling trial room, leaving the reader to judge Cromwell – and his entire gallery of contemporaries – plainly, personally and independently.