Wolf Hall

"TRY always," says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in "Wolf Hall," Hilary Mantel's fictional portrait of Henry VIII's turbulent court, "to find out what people wear under their clothes." Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can't produce an heir, wears a nun's habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won't let the king know what she's wearing until their wedding night; she says "yes, yes, yes" to him, "then she says no." Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king's dirty work just as he once did the cardinal's, what is he hiding under his lawyer's sober winter robes? Something "impermeable," Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell's forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone. Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein's great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his "good eyes' stern, facetious twinkle," in Robert Lowell's description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, "sure as that of a slaughterman's when he picks up the killing knife." One of the many achievements of Mantel's dazzling novel, winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours. Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel - tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were "a sheet of metal"; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because "France is where they have wars." Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family. In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he "can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian "art of memory" (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel "Fludd"), in. which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images. Cromwell is also, as Mantel sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther's battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the "brutal truth" of the Scriptures. "Why does the pope have to be in Rome?" Cromwell wonders. "Where is it written?" Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn's "resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom" caught the king's eye. Mantel, with the novelist's license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: "Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked." Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For Mantel, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry's divorce is the impetus for Cromwell's "Tudor Revolution," as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule. In "Wolf Hall" it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the "quaking world" aright. "Utopia," Cromwell learns early on, "is not a place one can live." More's refusal to recognize Henry's marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" and its 1966 screen version. To Mantel's Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt's title, seeks a way out for his old rival. There's a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? "You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley's cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again." Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell's. "That's how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash." IN her long novel of the French Revolution, "A Place of Greater Safety," Mantel also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of "Wolf Hall." Yet, although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels - the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase - her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, "the man in charge of everything," falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us. Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. "Wolf Hall" has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator's day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society - not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia "When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power," Cromwell reflects. "Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them." Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" is both spellbinding and believable. Thomas Cromwell can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight and fix a jury. Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of "Degas in New Orleans" and "A Summer of Hummingbirds."

"Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all . . . . This is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears."--Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books"On the origins of this once-world-shaking combat, with its still-vivid acerbity and cruelty, Hilary Mantel has written a historical novel of quite astonishing power. . . . With breathtaking subtlety--one quite ceases to notice the way in which she takes on the most intimate male habits of thought and speech--Mantel gives us a Henry who is sexually pathetic, and who needs a very down-to-earth counselor. . . . The means by which Mantel grounds and anchors her action so convincingly in the time she describes, while drawing so easily upon the past and hinting so indirectly at the future, put her in the very first rank of historical novelists. . . . Wolf Hall is a magnificent service to the language and literature whose early emancipation it depicts and also, in its demystifying of one of history's wickedest men, a service to the justice that Josephine Tey first demanded in The Daughter of Time."--Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic"Whether we accept Ms Mantel's reading of history or not, her characters have a lifeblood of their own . . . . a Shakespearean vigour. Stylistically, her fly-on-the-wall approach is achieved through the present tense, of which she is a master. Her prose is muscular, avoiding cod Tudor dialogue and going for direct modern English. The result is Ms Mantel's best novel yet."--The Economist"A novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry's formidable advisor, Thomas Cromwell. It's no wonder that her masterful book just won this year's Booker Prize . . . [Mantel's prose is] extraordinarily flexible, subtle, and shrewd."--Wendy Smith, The Washington Post"[Mantel's] interest is in the question of good and evil as it applies to people who wield great power. That means anguish, exultation, deals, spies, decapitations, and fabulous clothes . . . She always goes for color, richness, music. She has read Shakespeare closely. One also hears the accents of the young James Joyce."--Joan Acocella, The New Yorker"Dazzling . . . .Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. Wolf Hall has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike . . . . both spellbinding and believable."--Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review"Mantel's abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing. She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of England."--Ross King, Los Angeles Times"Darkly magnificent . . . Instead of bringing the past to us, her writing, brilliant and black, launches us disconcertingly into the past. We are space-time travelers landed in an alien world . . . history is a feast whose various and vital excitements and intrigues make the book a long and complex pleasure."--Richard Eder, The Boston Globe"Arch, elegant, richly detailed . . . [Wolf Hall's] main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words . . . Deft and diabolical as they are, Ms. Mantel's slyly malicious turns of phrase . . . succinctly capture the important struggles that have set her characters talking."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times"The essential Mantel element . . . is a style--of writing and of thinking--that combines steely-eyed intelligence with intense yet wide-ranging sympathy. This style implies enormous respect for her readers, as if she believes that we are as intelligent and empathetic as she is, and one of the acute pleasures of reading her books is that we sometimes find ourselves living up to those expectations. . . . If you are anything like me, you will finish Wolf Hall wishing it were twice as long as its 560 pages. Torn away from this sixteenth-century world, in which you have come to know the engaging, pragmatic Cromwell as if he were your own brother--as if he were yourself--you will turn to the Internet to find out more about him . . . But none of this, however instructive will make up for your feeling of loss, because none of this additional material will come clothed in the seductive, inimitable language of Mantel's great fiction."--Wendy Lesser, Bookforum"Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall, a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell . . . Mantel's crystalline style, piercing eye and interest in, shall we say, the darker side of human nature, together with a real respect for historical accuracy, make this novel an engrossing, enveloping read."--BookPage"The story of Cromwell's rise shimmers in Ms. Mantel's spry intelligent prose . . . [Mantel] leaches out the bones of the story as it is traditionally known, and presents to us a phantasmagoric extravaganza of the characters' plans and ploys, toils and tactics."--Washington Times"Historical fiction at its finest, Wolf Hall captures the character of a nation and its people. It exemplifies something that has lately seemed as mythical as those serpent princesses: the great English novel."--Bloomberg News"There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. Set during Henry VIII's tumultuous, oft-covered reign, this epic novel . . . proves just how inspired a fresh take can be. [Mantel] is an author as audacious as Anne [Boleyn] herself, imagining private conversations between public figures and making it read as if she had a glass to the wall."--People Magazine (four stars, People Pick)"Fans of historical fiction--or great writing--should howl with delight."--USA Today"[Mantel] wades into the dark currents of 16th century English politics to sculpt a drama and a protagonist with a surprisingly contemporary feel . . . Wolf Hall is sometimes an ambitious read. But it is a rewarding one as well."--Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor"This masterwork is full of gems for the careful reader. The recurring details alone . . . shine through like some kind of Everyman's poetry. Plainspoken and occasionally brutal, Wolf Hall is both as complex and as powerful as its subject, as messy as life itself."--Clea Simon, The Boston Phoenix"Reader, you're in excellent hands with Hilary Mantel . . . for this thrumming, thrilling read. . . . Part of the delight of masterfully paced Wolf Hall is how utterly modern it feels. It is political intrigue pulsing with energy and peopled by historical figures who have never seemed more alive--and more human."--Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald"Wolf Hall is a solid historical novel that's also a compelling read . . . Mantel's narrative manages to be both rich and lean: there's plenty of detail, but it's not piled in endless paragraphs. The plot flows swiftly from one development to the next."--David Loftus, The Oregonian"[Mantel] seamlessly blends fiction and history and creates a stunning story of Tudor England . . . . With its excellent plotting and riveting dialogue, Wolf Hall is a gem of a novel that is both accurate and gripping."--Cody Corliss, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "[A] spirited novel . . . . Mantel has a solid grasp of court politics and a knack for sharp, cutting dialogue."--Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly"This is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama,There will be few novels this year as good as this one."--Library Journal, starred review"Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players."--Publishers Weekly Excerpted from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.