Wolf Hall Bandwagon
Book choice for May 2019, by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall is a great and engrossing work of historical fiction. I ate it up in at few days and it was such a relief to sink into a wonderful page-turner (which also felt a weensy bit highbrow). It was lovely how it happened too: after a very patchy summer reading wise, riddled with unfinished boring books or no time to read at all, and after a productive but emotionally chaotic conference visit (when I got back I realized I hadn’t taken ONE picture of Paris, which pretty much sums up my academic life), and then our subsequent (and I mean the DAY AFTER I got back) move—-and AFTER the end of our hellish sprint as an Institute to submit the first volume of our Dictionary to the press—–after a few wild nights of staying at work til 4am—-I wandered dazedly to the only bookstore with some English books in town (the English shelf is now 2 shelves, to German’s detriment)—and I found a petite paperback copy of Wolf Hall. Thank god, I sighed.
And I was right! As so many before me had hinted. It was wonderful to be in our new apartment, surrounded by boxes and chaos, ignoring it all with something I wanted to read. Immediately after I finished it I bought the sequel on the kindle app so I could read it on my phone—I had no hope of finding a hardcopy of the sequel in a German bookstore. (And somehow this lack it choice makes my life and concentration better, in general).
I didn’t enjoy the second book as much as the first, but it absolutely wasn’t an effort to read. It concentrates on Thomas Cromwell (I really need to find out if his family tree sprouted the later Oliver Cromwell!) rather than the frankly more interesting personage of Anne Boleyn, which is of course a less-explored angle, but as the second book of the Wolf Hall trilogy is concerned with her downfall, the choice to restrict Anne to a few scenes…well, it wasn’t the story I knew well.
One thing that does stick in my memory is Cromwell’s impression of Anne in a pink and grey silk dress to the effect of “it should have been pretty and youthful but all I could think of was spilled intestines” which is bitingly lovely.
Hillary Mantel did seem to be a bit in love with Cromwell in the second book, which wasn’t a plus, in the way that she went to great lengths and used euphemistic and unrealistic means to exonerate him from having used torture to produce confessions from prisoners, which I am quite certain he did. These things were routine, but Mantel apparently didn’t want them in her hero.
There is also, in the second book a twice or thrice-repeated “impression” from the first book, which certainly was spooky and evocative the first time it was mentioned, but dulled swiftly with repetition.
All in all, I enjoyed both these novels (the second is called Bring up the Bodies or whatnot) the first intensively (I have since heard Jennifer from the Insert Literary Pun Here youtube channel say that Wolf Hall was the book that made her want to be a book reviewer, in order to be able to explain how it worked so well—which shows how late I am to this bandwagon, as she read it years ago and now IS a professional reviewer) and I will definitely read the third, to finish off Mr. Cromwell (probably literally).
A breath of fresh air, in a reading year into which I have perhaps already crammed too many classics. To forget oneself—is divine.