Wolf Hall

Aside from being a provocative name for a book, not sure why Hilary Mantel called this book Wolf Hall.  Jane Seymour's family resides there, but they are really fairly minor characters in this densely populated tome. My leisure reading tends to go fairly quickly. It seldom takes me more than a few days--a week at the outside--to finish a book, but this one took me about a month. Every single page is THICK with conversations that reveal relationships, intrigues and implications for the whole of Europe. Even with the help of a 5-page "cast of characters" and two royal family trees at the front of the book, I'm sure it would take me three readings to get everything that goes on. And I was really pissed to find that the author provided virtually no overview of the actual historical events that are the setting for the book, nor does she indicate her sources, except for one book by Cavendish about Thomas Wolsey. One can certainly find interviews that make clear she did her research! Nevertheless, the critics love this book, which won both the Man Booker and the National Book Critics Circle awards. The author certainly creates a compelling portrait of the main character, Thomas Cromwell, who rose from--according to this author--an abusive and impoverished life as a blacksmith's son to become the 2nd most powerful man in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry, Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey and several more minor characters are also well enough drawn to become distinct figures. It was often hard to keep the rest of the cast sorted out. Cromwell is portrayed as the consummate politician in a time when a miscalculation meant at least a fall from grace and at worst a horrible death. Mantel turns the common portrayals of Cromwell upside down by portraying him as compassionate, loyal and loving as well as strategic. It is a fascinating and challenging read for those who relish historical fiction. I will almost certainly read the sequels--one already published (Bring up the Bodies) and one still to come. There a more formal review of the book in the Wall Street Journal that works for me.