Wolf Hall

Christopher Hitchens

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.
—The Atlantic

Janet Maslin

In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's arch, elegant, richly detailed biographical novel centered on Cromwell…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.
—The New York Times

Wendy Smith

Henry VIII's quest to make Anne Boleyn his queen has inspired reams of historical fiction, much of it trashy and most of it trite. Yet from this seemingly shopworn material, Hilary Mantel has created 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 adviser, Thomas Cromwell. It's no wonder that her masterful book won the Man Booker Prize…Wolf Hall is uncompromising and unsentimenta…Mantel's prose is as plain as her protagonist…but also…extraordinarily flexible, subtle and shrewd. Enfolding cogent insights into the human soul within a lucid analysis of the social, economic and personal interactions that drive political developments, Mantel has built on her previous impressive achievements to write her best novel yet.
—The Washington Post

Christopher Benfey

…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. 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.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Set aside a full day to savor Simon Slater’s delightful reading of the Booker Prize–winning tale of Henry VIII’s court, seen through the eyes of his adviser Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s revisionist take turns Cromwell—so frequently vilified as in A Man for All Seasons—into a modern sort of hero, shrewd and adaptable. Slater’s narration is nuanced and precise; he breathes feeling and subtle shades of emotion into every exchange of dialogue. His is a heroic undertaking, and he does admirable justice to Mantel’s lucid prose and juicy plot. A Holt hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 17). (Dec.)

Library Journal

As Henry VIII's go-to man for his dirty work, Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) isn't a likely candidate for a sympathetic portrait. He dirtied his hands too often. In the end, Henry dropped him just as he had Cromwell's mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who counseled the king before him. But as Mantel (Beyond Black) reminds us, Cromwell was a man of many parts, admirable in many respects though disturbing in others. Above all, he got things done and was deeply loyal to his masters, first Wolsey and then the king. Nor was Henry always bloated and egomaniacal: well into his forties, when in good spirits, the king shone brighter than all those around him. VERDICT Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama: Henry's abandonment of wife and church to marry Anne Boleyn. It should appeal to many readers, not just history buffs. And Mantel achieves this feat without violating the historical record! There will be few novels this year as good as this one. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09; history buffs may also enjoy reading Robert Hutchinson's biography, Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister, reviewed on p. 66.—Ed.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Kirkus Reviews

Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII's schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn. Versatile British novelist Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost, 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (1527-35) of Henry's long, tumultuous reign. They're chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father's beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope's permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings' children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel's language isoriginal, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction. Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor.

From the Publisher

2010 AUDIE AWARD FINALIST: LITERARY FICTION
iTUNES: BEST AUDIOBOOKS OF 2009
THE WASHINGTON POST: TOP AUDIOS OF 2009
AUDIOFILE MAGAZINE EARPHONES AWARD WINNER Praise for the audio edition of WOLF HALL: “The 2009 Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer and counselor has been brilliantly served by English actor (and composer) Simon Slater. He gives an ironic, Machiavellian edge to his voice as general narrator and renders the myriad characters with exceptional virtuosity. This performance is the best of the year: an absolute triumph, further enhancing an already magnificent novel.”  – The Washington Post, Top Audio Books of ’09 “Set aside a full day to savor Simon Slater’s delightful reading of the Booker Prize-winning tale of Henry VIII’s court, seen through the eyes of his adviser Thomas Cromwell…Slater’s narration is nuanced and precise; he breathes feeling and subtle shades of emotion into every exchange of dialogue. His is a heroic undertaking, and he does admirable justice to Mantel’s lucid prose and juicy plot.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Slater seems to inhabit Cromwell’s very soul, his voice imbued with urbane assurance, dark despair, calculating ambition, and sardonic wit. Each character rings true…Mantel’s masterpiece, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2009, entrances with a gripping immediacy that carries listeners to a cliff-hanger ending, leaving fans clamoring for a sequel.” –Booklist, Starred Review “Simon Slater’s inspired narration of this year’s Booker Prize novel, set in the court of Henry VIII, is on every count one of this year’s outstanding audiobooks.” – AudioFile, Earphones Award Winner “Read by Simon Slater in possibly the best performance of his career, Wolf Hall...never ceases to be gripping...the best audio book of the year.” – The Winston-Salem Journal “Simon Slater does a masterful job of capturing Mantel’s abundant and diverse characters.” – Newsday “Simon Slater’s reading is equal to Mantel’s masterpiece, his voice shifting to match each speaker, with touches of rough British dialect, German and French accents expertly handled.” – BookPage, Audio of the Month "Simon Slater's performance brings Thomas Cromwell out of history and into humanity." – FictionAudiobooks "If you haven't read the most absorbing, beautifully written book of 2009, wait no longer. Better yet, listen to it, for you cannot imagine the 16th century coming to life as it does in the hands of author Hilary Mantel and reader Simon Slater in Wolf Hall." - Newark Star Ledger "Mantel gets the rich pageantry and conniving schemes just right in her richly detailed historical saga, and Slater gets Mantel just right as well. His reading does justice to the novel's language, slipping into character voices as deftly as Cromwell negotiated court politics." - Library Journal

“Listeners unfamiliar with British history will find Slater’s present-tense narration, as told through Cromwell’s perspective, an ideal method of storytelling, turning formidable historical figures into intriguing personalities. Slater seems to inhabit Cromwell’s very soul, his voice imbued with urbane assurance, dark despair, calculating ambition, and sardonic wit.” – Booklist, Starred Review

 

The Barnes & Noble Review

In Putney, England, in the year 1500, a young man is beaten, almost to death, by his drunken father. "Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen" in a yard that "smells of beer and blood." It is not the first beating, but it will be the last -- of this kind at least. The youth is Thomas Cromwell (1485?-1540), the central character in Hilary Mantel's astonishing Wolf Hall. He will become Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Master Secretary and "Viceregent of Spirituals" to King Henry VIII, and the chief architect of the Protestant Reformation. Soldier, politician, and power broker, he will be a gentle father himself. And a killer.

In historical fiction, Cromwell typically emerges as a stately edifice around which clouds of legend and history swirl -- a monument to be admired or demolished, depending on the author's prejudice. Hilary Mantel, however, has little interest in edifices. It is the mind of Cromwell, and the mind of Tudor England, that she attempts to penetrate. We might expect nothing less from a versatile author who has, among many other accomplishments, powerfully dramatized the French Revolution in one novel (A Place of Greater Safety) and the consciousness of a modern psychic in another (Beyond Black). Nevertheless, in Wolf Hall, Mantel's ability to insinuate herself into a distant era and consciousness is almost uncanny. From that first brutal scene, the novel holds us fast and close.

Cromwell, the "felled" son, survives those early beatings, we realize, not only because he is tough and cunning but also because he understands his enemy, absorbs the attack, and bides his time. These qualities assist Cromwell's rise to power -- a story that, in Mantel's hands, is as thrilling as any espionage drama -- but they do not explain him. Mantel, to her credit, does not intend to explain him. Instead she creates this complex, elusive character before our eyes even as she compels us to see the world through his. It is a world of shadows and secrets, ideal terrain for a gifted fixer. "A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face," Cromwell explains. "It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires." He is about to be appointed Keeper of the Jewel House, a powerful position in 1532. Later, as the saintly and insufferable Thomas More faces execution, Cromwell similarly muses "my workings are hidden from myself."

The historical events in Wolf Hall are less opaque, and broadly familiar from numerous costume dramas and (generally) bad historical novels. King Henry VIII, besotted with Anne Boleyn and lacking a male heir after twenty years of marriage to Katherine of Aragon, demands an annulment of that marriage. The Pope, most of Europe's monarchy, and many scheming courtiers oppose him. Even Cardinal Wolsey, the King's deviously brilliant adviser, fails and eventually perishes in his attempt to sway Rome and its allies. England itself, ruled by a willful monarch, lorded over by ruthless aristocrats and terrorized by plague, is divided and fearful.

We know what will follow historically: Henry's six wives, the beheadings, the religious persecutions. But Mantel leaves that to the future. Instead of treading well-worn ground, she sets Wolf Hall in the tense years (1500-1535) leading up to the Protestant Reformation, a critical period in Cromwell's personal ascent and in England's political transformation. "What was England before Wolsey?" Cromwell reflects when his mentor dies in 1530, "A little offshore island, poor and cold." Ever Wolsey's protégé, Cromwell envisages an England of secular laws, with a healthy treasury and a literate populace unfettered from the Roman faith and from its own superstitions.

Indeed, in Wolf Hall Cromwell embodies that new England: he is the blacksmith's son who becomes the King's man. "His guess is, the clergy own a third of England," Mantel has Cromwell musing as he nudges the monarch towards dispossession of the church. "One day soon, Henry will ask him how the Crown can own it instead. It's like dealing with a child; one day you bring in a box, and the child asks, what is in there? Then it goes to sleep and forgets, but next day, it asks again. It doesn't rest until the box is open and the treats given out." An earlier sketch gives us this Henry: "How brightly coloured the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye." Then this one: "The king comes in. It is a warm day and he wears pale silks. Rubies cluster on his knuckles like bubbles of blood."

In descriptions such as these -- tactile and immediate -- each character in Wolf Hall arrives before us with an ease that is both startling and seductive. We come to know intimately the mannerisms of Cardinal Wolsey ("He makes a great, deep, smiling sigh, like a leopard settling in a warm spot"); of Sir Thomas More ("More rises smoothly, as if the thought of custody has put a spring in his step; the effect is spoiled only by his usual grab at his garments, the scuffle as he shrugs himself together..."); of the Duke of Norfolk ("Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is as lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an ax-head"); of Anne Boleyn ("...her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp"). Even the infant Elizabeth becomes a person: "Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence." And several times we glimpse Henry's daughter Mary (later Bloody Mary) as a girl who, like Cromwell, cultivates the art of patience and of revenge.

This is a crowded stage, yet each player, however minor, is permanently fixed in our memory, thanks to Mantel's psychological acuity and her compressed, often startling language. Great events, such as the coronation of Anne Boleyn, are similarly arresting. "Sixteen knights carry Anne in a white litter hung with silver bells which ring at each step, at each breath: the queen is in white, her body shimmering in its strange skin, her face held in a conscious solemn smile, her hair loose beneath a circle of gems."

Horrors are also depicted with unflinching clarity. Cromwell is just a child when he sees his first religious martyr burned at the stake, an old woman, a Protestant "Loller," who is herded to her death by "two monks, parading like fat gray rats, crosses in their pink paws." As Henry's enforcer, Cromwell will see other monks publicly disemboweled and will fail to prevent Thomas More's beheading. Mantel also shows Cromwell's private torments as plague kills those he loves and almost takes him. To this extent, the man is humanized but never pitiable -- and never innocent. "The fate of peoples is made like this," he observes in 1535, as he negotiates with a French envoy, "two men in small rooms...This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh."

The novel ends on a similarly tantalizing note, with Cromwell about to visit Wolf Hall, seat of the Seymours. Little Jane Seymour has caught his eye -- and Henry's too. The exquisite tension with which Mantel leaves us is that of the tightened bow, of the arrow before it flies. --Anna Mundow

Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.