In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political powerEngland in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe … most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
more
This and Bring up the Bodies are so brilliant, funny, moving, sharp, surprising. Also, I love how Mantel’s storytelling is so steeped in Shakespeare.
As much as I love Tudor history, this historical fiction novel took me about 50 pages of reading to get in to it but I’m glad I stuck with it. I never viewed Thomas Cromwell in a sympathetic light and probably never will but I could understand where he was coming from as a servant of the king because let’s face it, Henry VIII was someone you had to move mountains for if you didn’t want your head to be cut off back then. I didn’t know too much of Cromwell’s past and I thought the author did a good job of bringing up his history to highlight how he turned out to be such a stern and calculating person.
If you haven’t seen it, Masterpiece Classic (typically on PBS) has a self-titled series on this book with Mark Rylance playing Cromwell and he is spectacular at it. He’s one of those actors whose silence and body language is as captivating as his speech in every scene he is in. Damian Lewis from Homeland plays a naive and emotionally stunted version of Henry VIII and Claire Foy (from The Crown) plays a demanding and manipulative Anne Boleyn. Great show and great book.
Mantel has an exclusive style to her writing which is magical. This is one book I have read several times and it is rare for me to want to return to a novel for a re-read. Her writing is so well layered that there is much to enjoy the second time around as you have time to take in the details you missed the first time in your desire to follow the story.
Sam Burnell – author of the Mercenary For Hire Series of Historical Fiction Novels.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07WWJPMTR/ref=series_rw_dp_sw
“Wolf Hall” is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the time. If you are interested in Henry VIII and the Tudor dynasty, it’s a must-read.
While these books have been universally praised, I found myself torn. The author definitely has a way with words and the storytelling is unique. But the point of view is confusing. Perhaps I’m too lazy to work that hard to figure out who is who. I know this is Cromwell’s POV, but it also is omniscient at many times. If I didn’t already know who most of the people were, I confess I probably would have been very lost.
It seems like people either love Wolf Hall or hate it — it’s not a given for those who love the subject, because Mantel’s massive historical fiction story about Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and the rise of Anne Boleyn told through the lens of Thomas Cromwell is a lot to handle.
Mantel injects a ton of history here, and we get a lot more detail about Cromwell and his cohorts than we do from the likes of Alison Weir, Phillippa Gregory, Robin Maxwell, or other Tudor novelists. While typically history has made us less empathetic to Cromwell’s ultimate fate, Mantel gives us an inside look at a man that was devoted to his job, family, and king, no matter how crazy the requests became and how much sacrifice it took. I found myself wanting to join Cromwell and his sons for dinner, and giving him kudos for how he managed Henry’s whims and fickleness.
If you read Wolf Hall and like it, follow it up with Bring Up the Bodies.
I really enjoyed this book. I have to admit I watched the excellent PBS Masterpiece series first, which I think helped endear this book to me even more so. The prose and ingenious play on words were subtle, but sprinkled throughout, and were ingenious.
5/5 stars
I highly recommend.
I have read this book multiple times, and I have yet to get tired of it. I have also watched the wonderful PBS series based on the first two books in this trilogy. I really hope the next season for the third book gets finished soon! Ms. Mantel really brings the age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell to life!
Um. The three stars are an average of my reactions. I can see how this book could be viewed as a five star piece of literary fiction. I also found it close to unreadable and gave up halfway through. Mandle has a deft touch and creates scenes and personalities with just the right word, just the right phrase. Each sentence individually is a masterpiece. And sometimes those sentences work together to create vivid scenes, either or external action or of the internal turmoil of an individual. However, I never found a narrative–and I know a lot of Tudor history. I recognized the cast of characters and one of the strengths of the book in my mind is how insightfully she gave complex personalities to those historical figures. I found her characterizations completely believable.
However, I had an odd sense of floating dream-like through her story. Pages of prose drift from one point of view to another, leaving me unsure if I was reading thoughts (whose thoughts?) or reading about someone (who?). It didn’t help that the vignettes–and this novel is very much a series of vignettes–are not presented in order. There’s such a thing as being too artsy-fartsy.
I didn’t watch the TV adaptation so had not been influenced by somebody else’s ideas. I loved this book! I found it a little difficult to ‘get into’ the writing style at first so kept going back a few lines! Was he speaking? Was he thinking? Didn’t take long though & I was thoroughly immersed. A triumph, couldn’t wait to read the rest of this trilogy!
I read this book, and the second in the series a few years ago, mainly because I noticed that Wolf Hall won the Man Booker prize – for a Tudor novel! Now to my mind the time of the Tudors has been written about by so many authors that I thought this must be something special to win such a prestigious award.
And it is. It’s breathtakingly original. It pulls you right into the centre of the corrupt court of King Henry VIII, and while you’re reading the book, you’re living there, absolutely. Or I am. For the last few days I’ve sat outside in the glorious sunshine, surrounded by glorious Scottish nature, but when I’ve been reading the book, all that disappears and I’m in London. I’m now re-reading, because the final book in the trilogy has been published, and I decided to refresh myself!
The main character in the book is Thomas Cromwell, who has not got come down to us with a good image, but Mantel’s Cromwell is a fascinating, multi-faceted man, finding his way through incredibly complex times, all of which are beautifully described. If you love historical fiction and you haven’t read this, read it. You will not be disappointed.
Fabulous
Very entertaining. I loved the observational style of the novel.
First in a remarkable trilogy.
Hilary Mantel is the best. Her trilogy of Thomas Cromwell will be classic literature.
Hilary Mantel brings the court of Henry VIII vibrantly to life with all its feasting and fun, dangers and intrigues, conspiracies and betrayals. Axes fall, heads roll. But humbly born courtier Thomas Cromwell has learned the art of never falling from favor from his mentors, especially Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. Then Anne Boleyn arrives and throws a few extra curves into the plot. Wolsey and More themselves, one after the other, fall from grace. Can Cromwell, in their place, serve his King as Wolsey and More could not or would not, and still keep his head on his shoulders?
This book is what writing is all about. Or should be all about. The intellect, and the scholarship, illuminate the grand creativity of the writer. I could not put these books down.
Nothing gets me going like chunky historical fiction and that goes double for anything that has any connection to the Tudors. Wolf Hall has therefore been on my TBR list for some time but I’ve been waiting for just the right occasion to bust it out. I was not disappointed. Mantel brings the brutal world of Tudor England to life, from the slums of Putney to the glittering Hampton Court. The novel centres around Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who pulled himself up from nothing to become Principal Secretary to Henry VIII and his closest confidant. He is credited as the man who pulled off one of the most famous divorces in history and was one of the most powerful voices in favour of the reformation of the church in England. But Mantel shows us the complicated man who exists alongside the historical figure, giving the reader a flawed but sympathetic protagonist whose story you will be utterly consumed by. She also accomplishes this feat with many other famous historical figures such as Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, rendering them in all of their human complexity. No one in this book is all hero or all villain. Unfortunately, the reader knows the gruesome end Cromwell meets but I couldn’t help but be swept up in the first act of this tragedy, in which the protagonist rises to great heights before being struck down. I’ll certainly be picking up Bring Up The Bodies and The Mirror and the Light in due time to see his story through to the bitter end.
A great historical series
What historical fiction should be!