Sean

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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I'm guessing that they're just giving the book two months instead of one since it's pretty long and they were probably busy with work related things like E3.

 

In the case of Wolf Hall I would not call it a challenging book, because there is very little required of the reader besides keeping a lot of historical figures in their head. 

 

I actually found the book really hard to read at first because of how many characters it introduces. I'm really bad with remembering names so I struggled for a while until I became used to her writing style and was able to learn all of the names. That said, I loved the book and I look forward to reading the sequel after The Sun Also Rises.

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I actually found the book really hard to read at first because of how many characters it introduces. I'm really bad with remembering names so I struggled for a while until I became used to her writing style and was able to learn all of the names. That said, I loved the book and I look forward to reading the sequel after The Sun Also Rises.

 

Yeah, it was quite the knowledge shock. I had the advantage of starting it on a trip to Paris where I was predisposed towards an interest in 16th century European politics.

 

 

But aren't those two basically the same idea? The moment you realize you're truly fallible is the moment you become fallible.

 

I struggle with parsing your perspective here. Those don't seem the same at all the same to me. It seem to equate ignorance with correctness, though I think you may be striking at ignorance being virtually equivalent with moral authority, which is often the case.

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I think it's kind of like when Wile E. Coyote chases the road runner off a cliff. Coyote's fine, until he looks down. 

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I was going to hold off talking about this until the podcast, but I am starting to forget what I wanted to say so I'll just write it now. I basically like a lot about the book. It's pretty well-written and plotted, and parts of the prose are incredible. I really enjoyed a lot of the fever dream sequences, which is odd because I often hate those parts of books. I am going to focus on what I didn't like, though, on the premise that criticism is more interesting than praise.

Here is my problem: I don't really understand what this book was "about". It felt like a whole sequence of events without any particular overarching theme. So, we start with the death of the Cardinal, proceed to Cromwell orchestrating the marriage of Henry and Anne, and conclude (more or less) with the death of Thomas More. These are all important parts of Cromwell's life, but they don't really connect in an important or interesting way (for me anyway). For this reason, I felt that the novel didn't really hold together as having some central narrative arch. Cromwell is pretty much the same at the end of the book as he is at the end. So is the King, the Dukes, and so on. A whole bunch of stuff happens, but I didn't feel like I learned anything about any of the characters or that any of the characters really developed.

That's not to say the book doesn't have certain themes, like the relationship of master to servant, the concept of nationhood versus religion, and exploring some enlightenment ideas. I just felt like something was missing at the center of the book.

So while I enjoyed the book, I guess I was left asking "what is the point"?

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For me, the plot was basically the rise of Thomas Cromwell. He escapes his abusive father, leaves the shadow of his patron, meets a great challenge in the Anne/Henry situation, and finishes by seeing one of his greatest opponents dead. This is made especially spicy knowing that there's two books left, and there's nowhere to go but down.

 

I came away with the opposite impression and found it amusing how well the book encapsulated a real person's life in a narrative arc.

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I see what you mean, but then it's as if the novel as the first part of a narrative arch (Cromwell's rise to power) but not the rest of the narrative arch. That's kind of what I mean when I say the novel lacks a narrative arch. It's a bit as if this is just the first act of a three-act play, and taken on those terms it feels incomplete. It may be more coherent when all three books are completed; but in that case, you'd have to wonder why it should be released as a trilogy at all (instead of as one complete whole). I think Mantel intends Cromwell's life to be a tragedy, but the essence of a tragedy is a reversal of fortune. Here we have the fortune, but not the reversal. That left the book feeling (for me) strangely anti-climactic.

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For me, Wolf Hall is about the many ways men gain power and hold on to it. Wosley and Thomas Moore are both examples of how holding onto your religious ideals may give you moral superiority but it may also cost you your life, and Cromwell and Henry are examples of brute but effective pragmatism. There's also elements of family relationships, women's sexuality and power, and the developing political history of Great Britain. A lot is packed into this book, but because these themes aren't that grandiose or explicit, it's easy to ignore them. I recently read John le Carré's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which you could very easily describe as being a book that's just about a spy who solves a mystery. That's a gross simplification of everything that happens in the book, of course, but writers like le Carré and Mantel do a great job of weaving theme into narrative without making the former overly explicit or hamfisted.

 

It works as a standalone, but reading Bring up the Bodies (and hopefully the third book) brings more of these ideas to the foreground.

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I see what you mean, but then it's as if the novel as the first part of a narrative arch (Cromwell's rise to power) but not the rest of the narrative arch. That's kind of what I mean when I say the novel lacks a narrative arch. It's a bit as if this is just the first act of a three-act play, and taken on those terms it feels incomplete. It may be more coherent when all three books are completed; but in that case, you'd have to wonder why it should be released as a trilogy at all (instead of as one complete whole). I think Mantel intends Cromwell's life to be a tragedy, but the essence of a tragedy is a reversal of fortune. Here we have the fortune, but not the reversal. That left the book feeling (for me) strangely anti-climactic.

I've been reading it as the first act of three all along, and being a fantasy reader I have no issue with fat trilogies, so while I agree with your point, it's not one that bothers me.

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For me, Wolf Hall is about the many ways men gain power and hold on to it. Wosley and Thomas Moore are both examples of how holding onto your religious ideals may give you moral superiority but it may also cost you your life, and Cromwell and Henry are examples of brute but effective pragmatism.

That's a really interesting way of putting it. I hadn't thought of Cromwell as a pragmatist. I thought of him as someone who was completely loyal to whoever his master was. But I guess in a sense, in the world Cromwell is living in, there's not always much of a difference between loyalty and pragmatism. The consequences of disloyalty are just so harsh. So I guess the question is then whether Cromwell is loyal because he is pragmatic, or whether he behaves in a brutish and pragmatic way because he is totally loyal to a brutish and pragmatic king.

One other thing I thought about the book: it seemed strange and interesting how much of Cromwell's formative experiences happen "off-screen". We see Cromwell as a child/adolescent, and we see Cromwell as uber-competent apparatchik, but we don't ever really see how Cromwell changed from child to adult. A lot of his younger life is hinted at, but we never really learn how Cromwell came to be the competent, ruthless, indispensable functionary. I wonder if this was a deliberate choice, or whether it was a result of a gap in the historical record. It just strikes me as strange that we don't really ever get to see Cromwell grow or change as a character.

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I think it's a bit of both. Mantel is obviously cool with making up motivations and extra details where the need arises, and as this is historical fiction there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure that there are many details that we DO get that are totally made up (the three brothers welcoming him in in a foreign country struck me as a pretty obvious embellishment, for example). That said, the book does point out the benefit of concealing your past, not because you did anything particularly shady, but because it's more useful to have people unsure how shady you are. I think that employing that not only on others in the book but on the reader as well is a very strong choice that Mantel made to drive that point home. We get to make up our own motivations, as sinister or not as we want them to be, and do so cognizant of the fact that this is exactly what (Mantel's) Cromwell would want us to do were we actually face to face with him. I like that ambiguity a lot.

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I think Miffy's got it. Factually speaking, we know absolutely nothing about Cromwell's life before he returns to England in 1515 and marries Elizabeth Wyckes, besides his birthplace, the record of a stay in Rome in 1514, and whatever he told his friends. I've said before in this thread that I love how Mantel preserves the mystery of her main character's past while not leaving him the complete cipher his youth is in actuality.

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I think it's a bit of both. Mantel is obviously cool with making up motivations and extra details where the need arises, and as this is historical fiction there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure that there are many details that we DO get that are totally made up (the three brothers welcoming him in in a foreign country struck me as a pretty obvious embellishment, for example). That said, the book does point out the benefit of concealing your past, not because you did anything particularly shady, but because it's more useful to have people unsure how shady you are. I think that employing that not only on others in the book but on the reader as well is a very strong choice that Mantel made to drive that point home. We get to make up our own motivations, as sinister or not as we want them to be, and do so cognizant of the fact that this is exactly what (Mantel's) Cromwell would want us to do were we actually face to face with him. I like that ambiguity a lot.

That's really interesting. Thanks!

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Hello Idle Thumbs faithful. I’ve been a fan of Idle Thumbs & Three Moves Ahead for quite a while but I didn’t decide to join to interact with the forums until I started to take part in Idle Book Club.

 

I had a free day today so I decided early that I would go downtown by the bay at a cafe & not come home until all of Wolf Hall was read. Many of my problems when reading of English nobility is that, almost all of it is obnoxiously favorable to the Tudors. It’s funny that just recently while I was playing a lot of Crusader Kings II & blogging about it over at Giantbomb, I was unsuccessfully searching for non-Tudorcentric perspectives on The War of the Roses. While I didn’t find that in Mantel’s novel here, certainly I did find in it that she was purposefully trying to look through history of this time period with different biases than is the norm.

 

These biases, painted a cast of characters that I found abhorrent. There are no heroes there’s only Thomas Cromwell, little more than conservator over the shift in power from nobility & the church to this new class that would be known as bourgeois. This transition was an important one historically, and as disgusting as I find the cast, it felt proper in a way that I haven’t read of this time period. The nobles are a grody bunch, stuck in their ways & eerily modern. I couldn't help but pause while reading the book seeing privileges people walking by in their own right & see in them the cast from the novel.

 

My favourite part of the novel was when Cromwell was visiting the King Francis of France and he says “Monsieur Cremuel, we may not meet again. Your Sudden fortunes may not last. So, come, give me your hand, like a soldier of France. And put me in your prayers.” When I read that part of Wolf Hall, I paused looking up noticing that my County Commissioner, an ambitious man in his own right slightly overweight & toady in appearance & plain-spoken just like Cromwell’s description in the novel was parking his Cadillac to go into a government building for what I assumed would be a meeting. This man, having been caught by the FBI for convincing an opponent to fall out of a race with a bribe, was to me the embodiment of Cromwell. Having to ask myself, was Cromwell really like this or is Mantel projecting modern bias exaggerating his ambition? How little it must be these instruments of the state have changed in their approach in the five centuries since the protestant reformation. King Francis's love of Cromwell was a rather poetic sort of irony, foreshadowing the rest of the novel & putting the transition in power between royalty & bourgeois in greater context.


This is both refreshing and exhausting for me to think about. I apologize if this doesn’t fit the parameters of discussion. I just got home from reading the entire book in one sitting & here were my unbridled thoughts. They’ll probably change once I sleep on them.

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No, I definitely found a disgust of the English nobility by the end of Wolf Hall. I actually had to get a biography to remind myself why we think of King Henry VIII Tudor as anything more than a lustful spendthrift (answer: one of his children turned out alright). I was even a bit pleased in a perverse way to find that Thomas Howard, Lord Norfolk had become my favorite among the rotten crowd by the end of the book, for the very pride and backwardness that left me hating him at first.

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I thought Henry came off as way more sympathetic than that, probably the most sympathetic portrayal that I've ever seen of him. The other nobles are generally just shown as schemers, but Mantel makes an effort to explain (possibly even justify) Henry's motivation and to show his genuine friendship with Cromwell. Wolf Hall made me care about Henry VIII more than any other piece of fiction or non-fiction. 

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Well Mantel is definitely taking a pro-Cromwell take on the history as opposed to Thomas More which the history books prefer overwhelmingly. By taking a pro-Cromwell stance Henry has a more favorable position by default. That said, I found him to be no more than an impotent man-child.

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I thought Henry came off as way more sympathetic than that, probably the most sympathetic portrayal that I've ever seen of him. The other nobles are generally just shown as schemers, but Mantel makes an effort to explain (possibly even justify) Henry's motivation and to show his genuine friendship with Cromwell. Wolf Hall made me care about Henry VIII more than any other piece of fiction or non-fiction.

I agree. He came off as legitimately human—an actual person whose flaws would probably manifest themselves in relatively unremarkable (if not always admirable) ways were he born as a normal member of society, but which are allowed and encouraged to become monstrous when empowered by a royal station.

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You also see him largely through Cromwell's eyes, who by virtue of being a great pragmatic, and generally cool under pressure isn't awestruck by his grandeur.

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You also see him largely through Cromwell's eyes, who by virtue of being a great pragmatic, and generally cool under pressure isn't awestruck by his grandeur.

Cromwell may not be personally awestruck by it in the way others are, but he is aware of it, and I feel Mantel effectively conveys to the reader how Henry's force of will does indeed create a palpable aura of power around him—which makes his often pathetic insecurities revealed in confidence all the more meaningful.

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Cromwell may not be personally awestruck by it in the way others are, but he is aware of it, and I feel Mantel effectively conveys to the reader how Henry's force of will does indeed create a palpable aura of power around him—which makes his often pathetic insecurities revealed in confidence all the more meaningful.

 

That's true. There's a scene where Henry visits Cromwell at Austin Friars that I found to be the most affecting example of this. It's been long enough that I can't remember the page number, but Henry has dinner, flatters Cromwell's nieces, and engages in small talk. Cromwell is just so moved by the king's pride in being what he thinks is an everyman that I couldn't help but be moved as well.

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Mantel is able to make Henry feel human without sacrificing any of the attributes that a person born to be king would naturally have. He's a wonderfully complex character, but really, so are all the other side characters in this book. In the hands of a lesser author, Cromwell (by virtue of the story being from his perspective) would be the only standout character, but Mantel manages to overcome that. I might even be tempted to say that I enjoy the side characters more than Cromwell.

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Mantel is able to make Henry feel human without sacrificing any of the attributes that a person born to be king would naturally have. He's a wonderfully complex character, but really, so are all the other side characters in this book. In the hands of a lesser author, Cromwell (by virtue of the story being from his perspective) would be the only standout character, but Mantel manages to overcome that. I might even be tempted to say that I enjoy the side characters more than Cromwell.

I think I was most fascinated by Henry. Which isn't to say I liked him most, or found him the best-drawn of any character, necessary; but the way he was portrayed felt the most unique and ambitious in the context of fiction. Portraying a medieval monarch with this degree of subtlety can't be an easy task for a modern novelist.

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I think I was most fascinated by Henry. Which isn't to say I liked him most, or found him the best-drawn of any character, necessary; but the way he was portrayed felt the most unique and ambitious in the context of fiction. Portraying a medieval monarch with this degree of subtlety can't be an easy task for a modern novelist.

 

I feel that exact way about Anne Boleyn. Her relationship with Henry and her relationship with Cromwell were some of the most enjoyable parts of the book for me. Mantel is a genius at writing female characters.

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