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Reviews of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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by Hilary Mantel

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• Historical Fiction
• UK (Britain) & Ireland
• 17th Century or Earlier
• Top Books of 2009

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Book Summary

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 power.

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 power. England 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 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.

PART 1 Across the Narrow Sea

PUTNEY, 1500 So now get up." Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. Blood from the gash on his head— which was his father’s first effort— is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unraveling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut. "So now get up!" Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. "What are you, an eel?" his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace, and aims ...

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Booker Prize 2009

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Religion, power, politics, money and sex - key elements of human life - are all on full display in Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning novel. Any fan of historical fiction, especially the Tudor period in England, will find new ground covered here. There is something liberating about reading a story while already knowing how it will all turn out, yet I became so sympathetic to Cromwell that I found myself dreading his impending doom. Most impressive is Hilary Mantel's fresh new account of an old, old tale, placing it in the broad canvas of western civilization and the evolution of society... continued

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Wolf hall: cast of characters.

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The Explosions from Wolf Hall

May 21, 2015 issue

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Wolf Hall Part One and Wolf Hall Part Two: Bring Up the Bodies

Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies: The Stage Adaptation

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux

Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn and Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Wolf Hall Part Two: Bring Up the Bodies , on Broadway this spring

To all the qualities that make him such a remarkable actor, we must now add that Mark Rylance is a great lurker. In the mesmerizing BBC /Masterpiece television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s phenomenally successful novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who became, next to his master King Henry VIII, the second most powerful man in the troubled England of the 1530s. Rylance’s supremely watchful Cromwell is often at his most magnetic when he is loitering with intent. He is off-center—the soberly dressed man standing to the side while gaudy aristocrats strut their stuff in the Tudor court, the modest figure by the pillar in the church, a face in the crowd at a momentous execution.

Rylance can watch proceedings in so many ways—anxiously, quizzically, with an air of quiet satisfaction or wry amusement or detached contempt—that shots of him looking are often as intensely dramatic and as informative as any scene of scripted dialogue. They tell us who Cromwell is—a man who makes his way in a vicious world by observing more sharply, scrutinizing more carefully, creating scenarios and watching how those he must please or destroy will act them out. The cliché is vindicated: Rylance’s eyes are windows through which we catch glimpses of Cromwell’s soul.

But you can’t do this in the theater. The stage has no place for lurking. There is no camera to draw us away from the main action and toward the drab figure standing almost in the wings. We are the watchers—we are not interested in having someone do our looking for us. If sumptuously dressed couples are dancing a gavotte, our eyes feast on them and miss the still man on the margins. If a queen is about to be beheaded, we are not interested in the bureaucrat half-hidden in the curious crowd. If we are ever to know what is going on in that figure’s mind, he must, at some point, tell us directly or else we must be allowed to overhear him confiding in someone else.

But neither of these strategies would really work for a stage version of Cromwell. Having him address the audience would make a man whose essence is discretion and self-containment far too up-front. In the character notes she prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of her novels, now published with the text of Mike Poulton’s script, Hilary Mantel instructs Ben Miles, the fine actor who plays Cromwell:

No one knows where you have been, or who you know, or what you can do, and these areas of mystery, on which you cast no light, are the source of your power…. People open their hearts to you. They tell you all sorts of things. But you tell them nothing.

So Cromwell doesn’t have confidants. His beloved wife Liz dies of the “sweating sickness” early in the story, along with his two daughters, and he does not replace her. He will not be exposed by personal intimacy and he knows all too well that he lives in a world where confidences are betrayed. He spends too much time filching other people’s privacies to risk exposing his own. He trusts his ward Rafe Sadler and his son Gregory but his attitude toward them is paternal and protective. He does not burden them with his doubts or his yearnings, which means that we are not allowed much access to them either.

Hence, the fundamental problem of the RSC ’s stage version now on Broadway. Poulton writes in his introduction to the published script that he imagined the task of adapting Wolf Hall as being “like taking apart a Rolls-Royce and reassembling the parts as a light aircraft.” The analogy is revealing. In its scale, Wolf Hall is more a Boeing than a Cessna: twenty-three actors playing forty-one named parts over almost six hours of playing time between its two halves. It is a great technical feat to get it aloft and keep it airborne for so long. But the air is not really the right place for a piece of theater. It has to be grounded in a psychological reality. Poulton notes:

Some of the most memorable images in the books are formed in Cromwell’s head: his reflections, his plotting, his private anguish, and, most of all, his barely contained laughter.

On screen, we can get some notion of what is in Cromwell’s head by tracing the flickers of fear or triumph or humor that the camera catches on Rylance’s long, melancholic, and otherwise impassive face. On stage, that simply can’t be done. If it is to be more than a high-class pageant, the stage version has to find some other way to get under the skin of the story, some richness of language or some wonder of theatrical invention that, for all its impressive technique, the RSC ’s production does not possess.

The story, after all, is essentially familiar. It has always been too rich to let lie between the covers of history books. It has everything: sex, violence, and religion; the lurid, the tragic, and the grotesque. Cromwell’s career is inextricable from the politics of Henry VIII’s bedchambers. Through him we can trace the main events of England’s bizarre progress toward the Protestant Reformation: the failure of Henry’s wife Katherine of Aragon to give him a living male heir; Henry’s conviction that he has been cursed because Katherine was previously married to his own brother; the fall of the mighty lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, when he cannot secure papal approval for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine; Henry’s declaration of himself as head of the church in England and marriage to the aggressively ambitious Anne Boleyn; the execution of the dissident Sir Thomas More; Anne giving birth to a daughter (the future Queen Elizabeth) and then suffering two miscarriages; the accusations that Anne committed adultery with men including her own brother; the executions of Anne and her alleged lovers; Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour.

Cromwell is in the middle of much of this action. As Wolsey’s loyal right-hand man, he nearly falls with his master but places his supreme talents as a lawyer, banker, administrator, and plotter at Henry’s disposal. He takes power by ridding his master of the inconveniences of Katherine, More, and ultimately Anne. Mantel’s two novels (and hence both adaptations) take the story up to this point of triumph; the third, The Mirror and the Light , which will take Cromwell to his own execution, is a work in progress.

The urge to dramatize these events stretches back over more than four hundred years. William Shakespeare and John Fletcher wrote Henry VIII around 1613, though their play stops diplomatically short with the joyous christening of Elizabeth. Cinematic versions abound, not least because the story is fair game for everything from knockabout comedy (Charles Laughton in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII ) to pompous melodrama (Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold in Anne of a Thousand Days ) to agonized morality tale (Robert Bolt’s successfully filmed play on Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons ). On television, the 1970 miniseries The Six Wives of Henry VIII created, on both sides of the Atlantic, an appetite that has been fed most recently by the glitzy Showtime series The Tudors , which ran from 2007 to 2010. The most immediate question for any new dramatic retelling is: What’s new?

The common answer is that Cromwell himself is new, that a sympathetic portrait of a previously reviled figure is startling in itself. As Jim Dwyer’s recent piece in The New York Times puts it in its opening sentence: “Suddenly, after 500 years of infamy and obscurity, here comes Thomas Cromwell….” But there is no half-millennium of either obscurity or infamy. Cromwell has certainly been a hate figure for Catholics—the schemer who took England away from the true faith and the killer of the saintly Thomas More. In the protest culture of the 1960s, it was easy to see More as the brave dissident and Cromwell as the evil apparatchik: Cromwell is More’s persecutor in A Man for All Seasons and an utterly unscrupulous upstart in Anne of a Thousand Days .

But precisely because he was a villain to Catholics, he has also long been a hero to Protestants. Cromwell (who had his own company of players) was treated well in early-seventeenth- century drama. In Henry VIII , his eventual fall is prefigured as a martyrdom in the advice he is given by the defeated Wolsey:

Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s, Thy God’s, and truth’s. Then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell, Thou fall’st a blessèd martyr.

In the even earlier anonymous drama from the end of the sixteenth century, Thomas Lord Cromwell , Cromwell is indeed a martyr, destined in death “to rise to unmeasur’d height, winged with new strength.” His execution is a tragic mistake—at the end, as the axeman walks in with his head, a belated messenger arrives from Henry with a reprieve and even Cromwell’s enemies are left wishing “would Christ that Cromwell were alive again.” This strain of sympathy for Cromwell runs all the way up to The Tudors , in which James Frain so recently played him with many of the same qualities that Mantel’s version highlighted. He was politically ruthless but personally kind, clever, conscientious, and opposed to unnecessary cruelty.

In any case, who cares? You don’t sell more than three million copies of two dense literary novels, as Mantel has done, just by rehabilitating an unjustly tarnished reputation. The refurbished Cromwell must be speaking to something in contemporary culture and the job of the adapters is to figure out what that something might be. They must do so knowing that whatever it is, it is not primarily about religion. The religious background is important in both versions: More’s relentless pursuit of heretics, Cromwell’s sympathy for, and manipulation of, Protestant reformers, the willingness of those reformers to support Anne because she is on their side, Henry’s genuine conviction that God is punishing his sin. But it matters as historical setting, not as contemporary passion. There is no religious shortcut to engagement with these dramas, no assumption that Catholics will hiss Cromwell and cheer More and that Protestants will do the opposite. Some other connection must be forged.

What makes Mantel’s Cromwell appealing to readers, audiences, and TV viewers is that he is rather like most of them. He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe.

Giles Keyte/Playground & Co./Masterpiece/BBC

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall

But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have?

This terror is what we need to see on stage or screen and it’s what the TV version expresses much more powerfully than the theatrical adaptation. Some of this is a matter of choices about what to dramatize. While Mike Poulton’s version for the RSC and Peter Straughan’s for the BBC and Masterpiece broadly pick the same set pieces, there are important differences. Poulton chooses not to play out on stage the sudden deaths of Cromwell’s wife Liz and young daughters. We see his grief in retrospect and Liz appears later, rather ineffectually, as a ghost. For the audience, sympathy for Cromwell’s grief is constrained because we have seen very little of Liz and nothing of the girls. Even the one very early scene in which we get some sense of the bond between Cromwell and his wife is oddly played down in performance.

In the published script, Liz is talking about Katherine of Aragon’s tears, and Cromwell asks, “I’ve never made you cry, have I?” She looks at him for a long time and then replies, “Yes you have. But only with laughter.” In performance, these lines are simply dropped, as if there is not time to dwell on the relationship.

In the television series, by contrast, the relationships between Cromwell and his wife and daughters are beautifully established and their appallingly sudden deaths are heartbreakingly enacted. Rylance shows us this shock entering Cromwell’s soul and we know in every subsequent scene that he carries it deep within him. The momentary crumpling of Rylance’s face when he sees his daughters dead is like the opening of a crack in the public façade he has built so well.

The investment in these scenes pays large dividends. They establish Cromwell as indeed a middle-class man, his sweet domesticity in utter contrast to the sexual intrigue he will encounter at the court. And the suddenness of the deaths establishes better than anything else how capricious this universe really is and how little Cromwell’s decent personal values can protect him against its cruelties. Those cruelties are not just natural: on screen, unlike on stage, we see religious dissidents burned and, in a carefully brief but highly effective scene, Thomas More having a heretic tortured in More’s own house.

The television version is also stronger visually. The RSC ’s staging is very well lit with clear, clean white light allowing the sumptuous costuming to establish the Tudor world on a mostly bare stage. But in the television series, light is an unforgettable player in the drama. Everything is—or at least appears to be—shot with natural light and when this is not daylight, it is flickering firelight or softly glowing moonlight or the chiaroscuro of candles in the gloom. This works very effectively to establish the historic atmosphere but it matters even more for the way it takes us into a world where things are seldom clear or clean, where every light has its accompanying shadow.

And sometimes, the difference between the two versions is simply in the way they are written, acted, and directed. Take, for example, a superbly conceived scene that is, on paper, very similar in both adaptations. Cromwell has been sent by Henry to tell Katherine that the king is to be declared head of the church in England, giving him the power to annul their marriage. Katherine is seated but her frail daughter Mary, who is to be made a bastard, is standing beside her chair. Cromwell sees that Mary is ill and suggests that she sit on a stool. Katherine, wishing to show their resolve, insists that Mary stand. After some bitter dialogue, Mary faints. Cromwell is ready for this—he reacts instantly and gets her safely onto the stool.

What is going on in this small scene? The story is progressing, of course—we are learning of Katherine’s unflinching determination to insist on her royal rights and of the problem of what to do with Mary. But we are also learning about Cromwell. The underlying dramatic question is how much we are learning. On stage, we are learning two things—that Cromwell is essentially kind and that he anticipates what is about to happen. Ben Miles takes hold of Leah Brotherhead’s tiny, fragile Mary and sets her gently onto the stool. It is a straightforward act of decency.

On screen, the scene tells us many other things. Yes, Cromwell is being kind to Mary. But he is also in a battle of political wills with her mother, who is still a queen and who still expects to be obeyed. On stage, Cromwell asks Mary gently, “Won’t you sit, Lady?” On screen, he addresses not Mary but his adversary, her mother: “Madam, your daughter should sit.” Before Mary actually faints, he moves decisively to grab the heavy stool and places it next to her. He more or less commands her: “Will you not sit down, Princess Mary?” And then, to allay her embarrassment, he says gently, “It’s just the heat.”

In the way Rylance plays this scene, we see not just that Cromwell’s instincts are kind, but that his kindness has come to be wrapped up in political strategy. He is controlling the room, asserting himself against the queen, and he is being nice to a princess who may be down today but who, in this topsy-turvy world, may have power over him someday. On screen, this one small scene has layers of motivation and psychological drama that it lacks on stage.

At times, indeed, the RSC version seems to go out of its way to make Cromwell less complex. This is especially so in the playing out of Cromwell’s relationship with More. On screen, Anton Lesser’s superb More is at once nastier and more sympathetic. We see the victims of his ruthless campaign of torture and burning against those who wish to read the Bible in English, but we also see More at home, treating the women in his life with the same kind of tenderness that Cromwell showed toward his wife and daughters.

More and Cromwell are wary rivals, but they are also similar kinds of men, more like one another than either is like any of the aristocrats around the court. The shifting dynamic of their relationship as Cromwell rises and More falls is captured in a brief exchange that both versions draw from Mantel. More has given up the chancellorship in an attempt to retire into private life and avoid Henry’s demands that he support his breach with the papacy. Cromwell asks him what he will do now. More says, “Write. Pray.” Cromwell’s reply is: “Write just a little, perhaps, and pray a lot.”

Between Rylance and Lesser, this is a hugely telling moment—the rapier wit is also a stiletto to More’s throat. Cromwell is being funny, clever, and outwardly friendly. He is also delivering a threat. The full complexity of his qualities is woven into a single line. Yet in the stage version, this moment, though written into Poulton’s script, is completely thrown away. It is as if there was a fear that it would make Cromwell too unlikable. This is of a piece with a larger decision—whereas on screen we are drawn fully into Cromwell’s ruthless entrapment of More into the self-incrimination that justifies his execution, we get little sense of this on stage.

There is a similar exchange in the second part of the stage version. Now it is Anne Boleyn, whom Cromwell has done so much to elevate, who must be torn down. Anne and Cromwell have been allies, not just because they have needed each other, but because they too are alike. Both are upstarts, leaping over the established hierarchy. Both take advantage of a social fluidity that would previously have been unthinkable. As the imperial ambassador to London, Eustache Chapyus, puts it in the second episode of the TV series, “A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be…” The sentence does not need to be finished: the possibilities are endless. Now things are moving against Anne and it is this very fluidity that endangers her. She makes the mistake of threatening Cromwell by reminding him that he is a creature of Henry’s desires: “Those,” she says, “who are made can be unmade.” On screen, Rylance makes it clear how ironic the line is, how easily it can be turned back on the queen he has helped to make. On stage, this irony is all but lost.

The decision to flatten out the stage Cromwell in these ways is understandable. Things are complicated enough already. The head-spinning logistics of moving the huge cast on and off the stage, of suggesting multiple locations with a minimum of props, and of keeping a clear line through convoluted events present a formidable challenge. Poulton’s adaptation and Jeremy Herrin’s direction meet that challenge admirably. It is not surprising that in doing so they decided to keep Cromwell relatively simple, allowing the always absorbing Ben Miles, as Cromwell, to plot a clear path from good intentions to nasty means. If clarity is the main goal, this works.

But clarity is not really the point. Rylance’s watching eyes see everything clearly. But in the haunted hollows of his face is etched the knowledge that it is not enough even to see everything. He can watch his world’s capricious ways with life and death, he can even shape them to his advantage, but he can never make himself safe from their unending malice.

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by Hilary Mantel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2009

Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor.

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 is original, 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.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8050-8068-1

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009

HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Hilary Mantel ; edited by Nicholas Pearson

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas . She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Wolf Hall Paperback – August 31, 2010

WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER England 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 opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and 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's Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII. . . . Magnificent." ( The Boston Globe ).

• Book 1 of 3 The Wolf Hall Trilogy
• Print length 604 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Picador
• Publication date August 31, 2010
• Dimensions 5.59 x 1.11 x 8.28 inches
• ISBN-10 0312429983
• ISBN-13 978-0312429980
• See all details

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Editorial reviews.

“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 “Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall . . . . Magnificent.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love " Wolf Hall , Hilary Mantel­’s epic fictionalized look at Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power, came out in 2009, but I was a little busy back then, so I missed it. Still great today."―Barack Obama “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 “A huge book, in its range, ambition . . . in its success. [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 “Brilliant . . . A provocative, beautifully written book that ends much too soon.” ― The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) “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 “Inspired . . . 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) “A deft, original, but complicated novel. 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

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Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Across the Narrow Sea

PUTNEY, 1500

So now get up."

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

Blood from the gash on his head--which was his father's first effort--is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father's boot is unraveling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.

"So now get up!" Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. "What are you, an eel?" his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace, and aims another kick.

It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. I'll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.

"Look now, look now," Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he's dancing. "Look what I've done. Burst my boot, kicking your head."

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don't provoke him. His nose is clotted with blood and he has to open his mouth to breathe. His father's momentary distraction at the loss of his good boot allows him the leisure to vomit. "That's right," Walter yells. "Spew everywhere." Spew everywhere, on my good cobbles. "Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet."

Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean? His head turns sideways, his hair rests in his own vomit, the dog barks, Walter roars, and bells peal out across the water. He feels a sensation of movement, as if the filthy ground has become the Thames. It gives and sways beneath him; he lets out his breath, one great final gasp. You've done it this time, a voice tells Walter. But he closes his ears, or God closes them for him. He is pulled downstream, on a deep black tide.

The next thing he knows, it is almost noon, and he is propped in the doorway of Pegasus the Flying Horse. His sister Kat is coming from the kitchen with a rack of hot pies in her hands. When she sees him she almost drops them. Her mouth opens in astonishment. "Look at you!"

"Kat, don't shout, it hurts me."

She bawls for her husband: "Morgan Williams!" She rotates on the spot, eyes wild, face flushed from the oven's heat. "Take this tray, body of God, where are you all?"

He is shivering from head to foot, exactly like Bella did when she fell off the boat that time.

A girl runs in. "The master's gone to town."

"I know that, fool." The sight of her brother had panicked the knowledge out of her. She thrusts the tray at the girl. "If you leave them where the cats can get at them, I'll box your ears till you see stars." Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent prayer. "Fighting again, or was it your father?"

Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop gouts of blood: yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a cloth, for the devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter his servant. "Sit down before you fall down." He tries to explain that he has just got up. Out of the yard. It could be an hour ago, it could even be a day, and for all he knows, today might be tomorrow; except that if he had lain there for a day, surely either Walter would have come and killed him, for being in the way, or his wounds would have clotted a bit, and by now he would be hurting all over and almost too stiff to move; from deep experience of Walter's fists and boots, he knows that the second day can be worse than the first. "Sit. Don't talk," Kat says.

When the basin comes, she stands over him and works away, dabbing at his closed eye, working in small circles round and round at his hairline. Her breathing is ragged and her free hand rests on his shoulder. She swears under her breath, and sometimes she cries, and rubs the back of his neck, whispering, "There, hush, there," as if it were he who were crying, though he isn't. He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.

When Morgan Williams comes in, he is wearing his good town coat. He looks Welsh and pugnacious; it's clear he's heard the news. He stands by Kat, staring down, temporarily out of words; till he says, "See!" He makes a fist, and jerks it three times in the air. "That!" he says. "That's what he'd get. Walter. That's what he'd get. From me."

"Just stand back," Kat advises. "You don't want bits of Thomas on your London jacket."

No more does he. He backs off. "I wouldn't care, but look at you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight."

"It never is a fair fight," Kat says. "He comes up behind you, right, Thomas? With something in his hand."

"Looks like a glass bottle, in this case," Morgan Williams says. "Was it a bottle?"

He shakes his head. His nose bleeds again.

"Don't do that, brother," Kat says. It's all over her hand; she wipes the blood clots down herself. What a mess, on her apron; he might as well have put his head there after all.

"I don't suppose you saw?" Morgan says. "What he was wielding, exactly?"

"That's the value," says Kat, "of an approach from behind--you sorry loss to the magistrates' bench. Listen, Morgan, shall I tell you about my father? He'll pick up whatever's to hand. Which is sometimes a bottle, true. I've seen him do it to my mother. Even our little Bet, I've seen him hit her over the head. Also I've not seen him do it, which was worse, and that was because it was me about to be felled."

"I wonder what I've married into," Morgan Williams says.

But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder. The boy doesn't listen to him; he thinks, if my father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed her? No, surely he'd have been taken up for it; Putney's lawless, but you don't get away with murder. Kat's what he's got for a mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.

He shuts his eyes, to make the left eye equal with the right; he tries to open both. "Kat," he says, "I have got an eye under there, have I? Because it can't see anything." Yes, yes, yes, she says, while Morgan Williams continues his interrogation of the facts; settles on a hard, moderately heavy, sharp object, but possibly not a broken bottle, otherwise Thomas would have seen its jagged edge, prior to Walter splitting his eyebrow open and aiming to blind him. He hears Morgan forming up this theory and would like to speak about the boot, the knot, the knot in the twine, but the effort of moving his mouth seems disproportionate to the reward. By and large he agrees with Morgan's conclusion; he tries to shrug, but it hurts so much, and he feels so crushed and disjointed, that he wonders if his neck is broken.

"Anyway," Kat says, "what were you doing, Tom, to set him off? He usually won't start up till after dark, if it's for no cause at all."

"Yes," Morgan Williams says, "was there a cause?"

"Yesterday. I was fighting."

"You were fighting yesterday? Who in the holy name were you fighting?"

"I don't know." The name, along with the reason, has dropped out of his head; but it feels as if, in exiting, it has removed a jagged splinter of bone from his skull. He touches his scalp, carefully. Bottle? Possible.

"Oh," Kat says, "they're always fighting. Boys. Down by the river."

"So let me be sure I have this right," Morgan says. "He comes home yesterday with his clothes torn and his knuckles skinned, and the old man says, what's this, been fighting? He waits a day, then hits him with a bottle. Then he knocks him down in the yard, kicks him all over, beats up and down his length with a plank of wood that comes to hand . . ."

"Did he do that?"

"It's all over the parish! They were lining up on the wharf to tell me, they were shouting at me before the boat tied up. Morgan Williams, listen now, your wife's father has beaten Thomas and he's crawled dying to his sister's house, they've called the priest . . . Did you call the priest?"

"Oh, you Williamses!" Kat says. "You think you're such big people around here. People are lining up to tell you things. But why is that? It's because you believe anything."

"But it's right!" Morgan yells. "As good as right! Eh? If you leave out the priest. And that he's not dead yet."

"You'll make that magistrates' bench for sure," Kat says, "with your close study of the difference between a corpse and my brother."

"When I'm a magistrate, I'll have your father in the stocks. Fine him? You can't fine him enough. What's the point of fining a person who will only go and rob or swindle monies to the same value out of some innocent who crosses his path?"

He moans: tries to do it without intruding.

"There, there, there," Kat whispers.

"I'd say the magistrates have had their bellyful," Morgan says. "If he's not watering his ale he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's assaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world."

"Finished?" Kat says. She turns back to him. "Tom, you'd better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say? He'll be good to do the heavy work, when he's healed up. He can do the figures for you, he can add and . . . what's the other thing? All right, don't laugh at me, how much time do you think I had for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my name, it's because Tom here taught me."

"He won't," he says, "like it." He can only manage like this: short, simple, declarative sentences.

"Like? He should be ashamed," Morgan says.

Kat says, "Shame was left out when God made my dad."

He says, "Because. Just a mile away. He can easily."

"Come after you? Just let him." Morgan demonstrates his fist again: his little nervy Welsh punch.

After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind is, what am I going to do, I can't stay in Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it wasn't him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What is clear is his thought about Walter: I've had enough of this. If he gets after me again I'm going to kill him, and if I kill him they'll hang me, and if they're going to hang me I want a better reason.

Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can't pick out every word. Morgan says he's burned his boats. Kat is repenting of her first offer, a post as pot-boy, general factotum and chucker-out; because, Morgan's saying, "Walter will always be coming round here, won't he? And 'Where's Tom, send him home, who paid the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you're reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt.' "

He comes downstairs. Morgan says cheerily, "You're looking well, considering."

The truth is about Morgan Williams--and he doesn't like him any the less for it--the truth is, this idea he has that one day he'll beat up his father-in-law, it's solely in his mind. In fact, he's frightened of Walter, like a good many people in Putney--and, for that matter, Mortlake and Wimbledon.

He says, "I'm on my way, then."

Kat says, "You have to stay tonight. You know the second day is the worst."

"Who's he going to hit when I'm gone?"

"Not our affair," Kat says. "Bet is married and got out of it, thank God."

Morgan Williams says, "If Walter was my father, I tell you, I'd take to the road." He waits. "As it happens, we've gathered some ready money."

"I'll pay you back."

Morgan says, laughing, relieved, "And how will you do that, Tom?"

He doesn't know. Breathing is difficult, but that doesn't mean anything, it's only because of the clotting inside his nose. It doesn't seem to be broken; he touches it, speculatively, and Kat says, careful, this is a clean apron. She's smiling a pained smile, she doesn't want him to go, and yet she's not going to contradict Morgan Williams, is she? The Williamses are big people, in Putney, in Wimbledon. Morgan dotes on her; he reminds her she's got girls to do the baking and mind the brewing, why doesn't she sit upstairs sewing like a lady, and praying for his success when he goes off to London to do a few deals in his town coat? Twice a day she could sweep through the Pegasus in a good dress and set in order anything that's wrong: that's his idea. And though as far as he can see she works as hard as ever she did when she was a child, he can see how she might like it, that Morgan would exhort her to sit down and be a lady.

"I'll pay you back," he says. "I might go and be a soldier. I could send you a fraction of my pay and I might get loot."

Morgan says, "But there isn't a war."

"There'll be one somewhere," Kat says.

"Or I could be a ship's boy. But, you know, Bella--do you think I should go back for her? She was screaming. He had her shut up."

"So she wouldn't nip his toes?" Morgan says. He's satirical about Bella.

"I'd like her to come away with me."

"I've heard of a ship's cat. Not of a ship's dog."

"She's very small."

"She'll not pass for a cat." Morgan laughs. "Anyway, you're too big all round for a ship's boy. They have to run up the rigging like little monkeys--have you ever seen a monkey, Tom? Soldier is more like it. Be honest, like father like son--you weren't last in line when God gave out fists."

"Right," Kat said. "Shall we see if we understand this? One day my brother Tom goes out fighting. As punishment, his father creeps up behind and hits him with a whatever, but heavy, and probably sharp, and then, when he falls down, almost takes out his eye, exerts himself to kick in his ribs, beats him with a plank of wood that stands ready to hand, knocks in his face so that if I were not his own sister I'd barely recognize him: and my husband says, the answer to this, Thomas, is go for a soldier, go and find somebody you don't know, take out his eye and kick in his ribs, actually kill him, I suppose, and get paid for it."

"May as well," Morgan says, "as go fighting by the river, without profit to anybody. Look at him--if it were up to me, I'd have a war just to employ him."

Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink, chink, with enticing slowness.

He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold.

"Listen," Kat says, "we grew up here, there's probably people that would help Tom out--"

Morgan gives her a look: which says, eloquently, do you mean there are a lot of people would like to be on the wrong side of Walter Cromwell? Have him breaking their doors down? And she says, as if hearing his thought out loud, "No. Maybe. Maybe, Tom, it would be for the best, do you think?"

He stands up. She says, "Morgan, look at him, he shouldn't go tonight."

"I should. An hour from now he'll have had a skinful and he'll be back. He'd set the place on fire if he thought I were in it."

Morgan says, "Have you got what you need for the road?"

He wants to turn to Kat and say, no.

But she's turned her face away and she's crying. She's not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn't cut him out that way. She's crying for her idea of what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other's children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover, nice timely information, favor-for-favor, little sweeteners, little retainers, my attorney says . . . That's what it should be like, married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big family in Putney . . . But somehow it's not been like that. Walter has spoiled it all.

Carefully, stiffly, he straightens up. Every part of him hurts now. Not as badly as it will hurt tomorrow; on the third day the bruises come out and you have to start answering people's questions about why you've got them. By then he will be far from here, and presumably no one will hold him to account, because no one will know him or care. They'll think it's usual for him to have his face beaten in.

He picks up the money. He says, " Hwyl , Morgan Williams. Diolch am yr arian ." Thank you for the money. "Gofalwch am Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busnes. Wela i chi eto rhywbryd. Poblwc."

Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again sometime.

Morgan Williams stares.

He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn't split his face open. All those days he'd spent hanging around the Williamses' households: did they think he'd just come for his dinner?

"Poblwc," Morgan says slowly. Good luck.

He says, "If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?"

"Where are you trying to get?"

"To the sea."

For a moment, Morgan Williams looks sorry it has come to this. He says, "You'll be all right, Tom? I tell you, if Bella comes looking for you, I won't send her home hungry. Kat will give her a pie."

He has to make the money last. He could work his way downriver; but he is afraid that if he is seen, Walter will catch him, through his contacts and his friends, those kinds of men who will do anything for a drink. What he thinks of, first, is slipping on to one of the smugglers' ships that go out of Barking, Tilbury. But then he thinks, France is where they have wars. A few people he talks to--he talks to strangers very easily--are of the same belief. Dover then. He gets on the road.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. And then horses, he's always been around horses, frightened horses too, because when in the morning Walter wasn't sleeping off the effects of the strong brew he kept for himself and his friends, he would turn to his second trade, farrier and blacksmith; and whether it was his sour breath, or his loud voice, or his general way of going on, even horses that were good to shoe would start to shake their heads and back away from the heat. Their hooves gripped in Walter's hands, they'd tremble; it was his job to hold their heads and talk to them, rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how Walter will soon be over.

He doesn't eat for a day or so; it hurts too much. But by the time he reaches Dover the big gash on his scalp has closed, and the tender parts inside, he trusts, have mended themselves: kidneys, lungs and heart.

He knows by the way people look at him that his face is still bruised. Morgan Williams had done an inventory of him before he left: teeth (miraculously) still in his head, and two eyes, miraculously seeing. Two arms, two legs: what more do you want?

He walks around the docks saying to people, do you know where there's a war just now?

Each man he asks stares at his face, steps back and says, "You tell me!"

They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure.

Surprisingly, he finds he will leave Dover richer than he arrived. He'd watched a man doing the three-card trick, and when he learned it he set up for himself. Because he's a boy, people stop to have a go. It's their loss.

He adds up what he's got and what he's spent. Deduct a small sum for a brief grapple with a lady of the night. Not the sort of thing you could do in Putney, Wimbledon or Mortlake. Not without the Williams family getting to know, and talking about you in Welsh.

He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples of woolen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. "Please," says one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, "will you take care of these English coins for me? I find them surplus." Suddenly the clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have paid much more. When they board they say, "The boy is with us."

As they wait to cast off, they ask him his age. He says eighteen, but they laugh and say, child, you are never. He offers them fifteen, and they confer and decide that fifteen will do; they think he's younger, but they don't want to shame him. They ask what's happened to his face. There are several things he could say but he selects the truth. He doesn't want them to think he's some failed robber. They discuss it among themselves, and the one who can translate turns to him: "We are saying, the English are cruel to their children. And coldhearted. The child must stand if his father comes in the room. Always the child should say very correctly, 'my father, sir,' and 'madam, my mother.' "

He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they don't say anything stupid like, you can get another dog. He tells them about the Pegasus, and about his father's brewhouse and how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down other people's trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the common. They are interested in that; they show the woolen samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave, turning to him from time to time to include and instruct him. They don't think much of English finished cloth generally, though these samples can make them change their mind . . . He loses the thread of the conversation when they try to tell him their reasons for going to Calais, and different people they know there.

He tells them about his father's blacksmith business, and the English-speaker says, interested, can you make a horseshoe? He mimes to them what it's like, hot metal and a bad-tempered father in a small space. They laugh; they like to see him telling a story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at which one will nod, and which the other will translate. "We are three brothers. This is our street. If ever you visit our town, there is a bed and hearth and food for you."

Goodbye, he will say to them. Goodbye and good luck with your lives. Hwyl , cloth men. Golfalwch eich busnes . He is not stopping till he gets to a war.

The weather is cold but the sea is flat. Kat has given him a holy medal to wear. He has slung it around his neck with a cord. It makes a chill against the skin of his throat. He unloops it. He touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

WOLF HALL Copyright 2009 by Hilary Mantel

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (August 31, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 604 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312429983
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312429980
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.59 x 1.11 x 8.28 inches
• #141 in Renaissance Literary Criticism (Books)
• #1,336 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
• #18,107 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Hilary mantel.

Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. She is the author of fifteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have both been awarded The Man Booker Prize. The conclusion to The Wolf Hall Trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was published in 2020.

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The New York Times

Artsbeat | ‘wolf hall’ recap: cromwell the serpent makes an appearance, ‘wolf hall’ recap: cromwell the serpent makes an appearance.

Part 4, “The Devil’s Spit”

The more effectively historical fiction does its job, the more it blurs the lines between the known and the imagined. Watch Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” and you’ll come away thinking Salieri spent his life sticking pins into Mozart. Watch Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” and you’ll think the Salem witch trials could have been averted if John Proctor had received more lovin’ at home. Watch “Wolf Hall,” and you’ll think Thomas More (Anton Lesser) could have sidestepped the executioner’s blade if only as a teenager he had returned a lad’s wave.

That encounter with the young Thomas Cromwell is, of course, fictional, but it’s so pointedly inter-cut with the scene of More’s execution that you’d be excused for concluding that, if More had just asked that lad up for a beer, the course of English history might have changed.

But then, that would have required both of those boys to change – or at least to merge their stations – and from the looks of things, that wasn’t going to happen. Even in youth, More was a creature of the mind, lofting his thoughts to the stars, and Cromwell was a boy of the streets, wading through the muck and mire of the real.

Now it’s possible that, in his rise to power, Cromwell (Mark Rylance) found time to gaze from balconies or, heaven help us, play on a recorder, but that’s not where his value lies. He is, to quote Bishop Fisher (Richard Durden), “a ruffian.” Or worse, if we’re to believe King Henry (Damian Lewis): “Do you think I’ve promoted you for the charm of your presence? I keep you because you are a serpent.”

That metaphor calls us back both to Genesis and to the previously told story of Cromwell’s handling of snakes in Italy, but it also speaks to his serpentine finesse, which is superbly on view as he takes apart the conspiracy behind the prophetess Elizabeth Barton (Aimée Ffion-Edwards). One by one, he calls the guilty parties to justice in a cross-cutting sequence that recalls the famous climax of “The Godfather.” With this key difference: Cromwell the assassin never raises his voice or rises from his chair. His only weapon, really, is omniscience (“Everything they do now, they do under my eye”). He shows his enemies how much he knows about them, and once they have accepted his mastery, he gives them their marching orders: “Grovel.” “Fall ill.” “Take to your bed.”

This is the Cromwell the world expects (and fears): a man of deeds. So what happens when he encounters a man of ideas? For a time, nothing but stasis. The young Cromwell, on first meeting More, asks him what he’s reading and receives this dismissive answer: “Words, just words.” (Nearly identical to the reply Polonius gets from Hamlet.). But when the interrogator Cromwell encourages More to think of an oath to the king as mere “words,” More’s take on the concept reflects their altered relationship. “Ah,” he sighs. “Just words.”

By now it’s clear: Words are More’s currency. He can, at times, devalue them. (“If I say no to your oath, I put my body in peril; if I say yes, my soul. So I say nothing.”) He can, at times, give them supremacy. (“All I have, all I won, is the ground I stand upon. That ground is Thomas More.”) But words are his to wield, and that makes him an agony to his adversary. “Do you know what I hate most?” says Cromwell. More is “writing an account of today for all of Europe to read, and in it, we’ll be the fools and oppressors and he’ll be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase. He wrote this play years ago, and he sniggers every time I trip over my lines.”

This can be read as one more dig at the hagiography of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” in which More really does have all the best lines, but it also gets to the basic tension of tonight’s episode, which could easily be subtitled “Plato vs. Machiavelli” — or, if you like, “Idealism (With All Its Horrors) vs. Pragmatism (With All Its Corruptions).”

It’s no accident that the title of More’s best-known work, “Utopia,” literally translates as “nowhere.” As the learned son of a knighted judge, he is both ferociously ambitious (as Cromwell has noted) and profoundly abstract. That’s what allows him, in Hilary Mantel’s rendering, to persecute heretics without a thought to their suffering, and that’s what prevents him from bending when the political winds start blowing in a different direction.

As for Cromwell, he doesn’t lack for intellect or culture. He’s multilingual, a biblical scholar, and pals with artists like Hans Holbein (Thomas Arnold), but he doesn’t believe ideas matter, unless they can be converted into deeds. In this regard, his intellectual soul mate is his frenemy Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), who has made the tactical error of giving birth to a daughter and then miscarrying her next child. For the first time, notes of panic register in those agate eyes. “I won’t die,” she declares. “I’ll give the king a son, and I won’t die.” We know, of course, that neither of those statements is true. And maybe, just maybe, she’s beginning to know that herself.

Fraught Symbol No. 1: The trail of blood leading to (and away from) Anne. Hard not to hear the after-echo of Norfolk’s prophecy: “She’ll spit blood!”

Fraught Symbol No. 2: Cromwell compares his boss to a tamed lion. “You can pet him. You can pull at his ears if you wish. But all the time you’re thinking to yourself: Those claws. Look at those claws. ”

Most self-exposing simile: The Duke of Norfolk (Bernard Hill) likens a 20-year marriage to “placing your person inside a grizzled leather bag.” Wonder if his wife would have used the same analogy.

Machiavelli would be proud: Intuiting that More will reveal himself more freely to someone he despises, Cromwell makes a point of sending Richard Riche (Bryan Dick) alone into the prisoner’s cell. Or maybe Cromwell just intuits Riche will say anything to have More beheaded.

Other stuff …

* Loved seeing Cromwell pose for his now-famous Holbein portrait . If you revisit the actual painting, you’ll see how Cromwell’s actual face — in direct contrast to Rylance’s — repels both sympathy and empathy. No wonder it took centuries to restore his reputation.

* “Wolf Hall” has no shortage of world-class actors. In Part 4, Mr. Lewis was particularly good at conveying Henry’s anguish over his lost child, and Mr. Lesser, without chewing a single piece of scenery, managed to (temporarily) erase memories of Paul Scofield. But I hereby grant thespian honors to Monica Dolan, who, in a few minutes of screen time, turns Alice More into a living, breathing, wounded thing. Though writ small, it’s a performance that rivals Wendy Hiller’s work in “A Man for All Seasons.” (And what a brilliant line: “You’ve always been good to us. I wonder why.”)

* Finally, a tip of the hat to Ms. Mantel for titling an entire book after a place that the reader never, over the course of 600-plus pages, visits. Of course, she takes us there in the succeeding book, “Bring up the Bodies,” and so has “Wolf Hall,” the miniseries. Expect wolf howls before too long. (And remember how Count Dracula interpreted the sound: “Children of the night. What music they make.”)

Questions: When is Mark, “that little sneak,” going to come to plot fruition? Aren’t you longing for more of the catty, unloved Jane Rochford (Jessica Raine)? What was with that strange fever-dream vision of Cromwell’s dead wife weaving? (“If I stop to think how I’m doing it, I won’t be able to do it.”) And what is it about Tudor dress that makes every man look more virile?

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Queens Boulevard

By Emily Nussbaum

Once upon a time, before “The Sopranos” broke the monopoly, PBS was America’s primary source for prestige television. With little competition, the network perfected that brand, as exemplified by “Masterpiece Theatre,” an oracular phrase used without irony and with a kind of innocence. The network’s costume dramas might let you commune with genius, the logo hinted: they’d improve and elevate you, like a lecture at the 92nd Street Y. But, as TV drama grew out of its insecurities, the PBS lineup, despite small charmers, like “Call the Midwife,” began to seem stuffy, snoozy, and rather silly, an artifact of a time when the medium had to put on airs. “Wolf Hall,” the BBC adaptation of two Booker Prize-winning novels by Hilary Mantel, looked ominously like the same old, same old: a costume drama set in sixteenth-century England, scored to classical music, starring actors with faces like romantic ruins—yet another relic wheeled out of the vault.

Instead, the show’s deliberately paced six hours turn out to be riveting, precisely because they are committed, without apology or, often, much explanation, to the esotericism of their subject matter. (“Riveting” is what you call shows like this when you enjoy them; “dense” is what you say when you don’t.) Once I got comfortable with hitting Pause and consulting Wikipedia as needed, I found the series beginning to expand and deepen, intensifying with each episode. As it happens, “Wolf Hall” matches up perfectly with a more modern style of quality TV, since it’s a portrait of a dark, conflicted antihero—Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), a shrewd fixer of the Tudor era. Like so many of TV’s strategic geniuses, from Don Draper to Francis Underwood, Cromwell was a class jumper: the abused son of a Putney blacksmith, he transformed himself into a worldly man, a sort of internationalist MacGyver. At once a financial whiz, a legal genius, and a hard-knuckled mercenary, Cromwell could “draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury,” Mantel writes. In the book, Cromwell’s mentor and father figure, Cardinal Wolsey, describes him as “rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes,” but the TV Cromwell is less a thug than a surgeon, severing Henry VIII from his first wife, England from Rome, and, eventually, Anne Boleyn from her head. He’s a hero not because he’s virtuous but because he has no illusions, unlike his mirror self, the preening idealist Thomas More, a torturer and a religious fanatic who insists that he’s the good guy.

Mantel’s books “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” are embedded in Cromwell’s cautious, clever, pragmatic consciousness, which makes them virtuoso psychological portraits rather than action-packed potboilers. Any adaptation must flip Mantel’s story inside out, rendering it external, and the director Peter Kosminsky and the screenwriter Peter Straughan don’t fall into some obvious traps, like revealing Cromwell’s thoughts via voice-over, by now a television cliché. They also don’t go in for much exposition or explicitly libidinal kicks, à la Showtime’s “The Tudors,” rarely showing us the sex that’s on every character’s mind. Instead, we are privy to something realistically ugly: a hellscape of gossip, dominated by old men making mean remarks about the miscarriages of potential queens.

Instead, Kosminsky doubles down on the most alien qualities of the period, using hypnotic closeups and quietly formal frames, presenting burnished, candlelit images that resemble paintings from the era, along with some of the more memorable hats in TV history. The viewer is forced to reckon with the setting’s luxurious airlessness, its high-risk intimacies, in which eye contact and ill-conceived jokes are as treacherous as any war with France. Cromwell lingers on the periphery, like the world’s most dangerous therapist: he observes, and calculates, and shuts up while everyone else babbles and confesses. (In the later episodes, as the dominoes begin to fall, Cromwell bears some resemblance to “Breaking Bad” ’s Mike Ehrmantraut, another manly fixer with a poker face.)

The main plot features a long-con revenge scenario, as Cromwell, in the course of many years, seeks to avenge the shabby treatment of Wolsey—although, oddly, this surrogate-father dynamic is the one relationship that doesn’t quite translate from the book, despite the likable performance of Jonathan Pryce as Wolsey. In service of this story line, Kosminsky uses one rather cheesy visual motif: repeated flashbacks to a carnival at which masked nobles cruelly mock Wolsey, the sort of “Remember this?” flashback that has become way too common in recent TV dramas, from “The Newsroom” to “Empire.” (If you can trust us to keep this many people named Thomas straight, you can trust us to remember a motivating incident from only two episodes back.)

But such small weaknesses are outweighed by the potency of other relationships, which feel rich and terrifying—the Tower of London looms behind even the most innocent chitchat. There’s the Frog-and-Toad companionship of Cromwell and More (the terrific Anton Lesser), two philosophical rivals who trade undermining remarks but share a long history and a mutual respect. There’s the fragile closeness of Cromwell and Henry, who is played by Damian Lewis as a strutting, lusty paranoiac, a mercurial jock who gradually degenerates into his worst self. Best of all, there’s the peculiar affinity between Cromwell and the ambitious Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), a knight’s daughter who has convinced the King that she’s his soul mate, despite the opposition to their relationship from almost every other person on the planet, from the Queen, the Pope, and More to the impressively high proportion of the British population that views her as a demonic floozy.

Although Rylance gives a skilled performance, the surprise center of “Wolf Hall” is the wonderful Foy, who plays Anne as a gambler who knows that her body is her currency. Pearls framing her cleavage, eyes narrowed, chin high, she seems eternally aware that she’s being watched, because she’s stuck inside a truly insane system, a reproductive panopticon in which all that matters is the illusion of virginity and the emergence of a male heir, as wombs are traded like unstable derivatives. At moments, she’s the ultimate Rules Girl (“She’s selling herself by the inch,” her sister, Mary, notes). Yet she’s also legitimately seductive, witty, and tough—you can see Cromwell admiring her even when she drives him mad. “I was always desired,” she explains at one point. “But now I’m valued, you see? And that’s different.”

In one scene, the fixer and the aspiring queen stand side by side at a window, and he allows himself a brief reverie: as she lifts her face in profile, unmoving, he strokes her neck—a moment that doubles as an erotic fantasy and a death threat. Then the fantasy ends, and the two gaze down at the courtyard, watching Thomas More resign from his position as Lord Chancellor, a ceremonial moment that they know will have huge repercussions. “Soon you’ll have friends everywhere,” Anne remarks, as they negotiate who should take More’s place. It’s a cold arbitration, yet the scene is peculiarly playful, all smiles of recognition, glances, and warm grins—two policy wonks playing chess.

“So that’s it? More is out?” Anne says. “Shall we go down?”

Cromwell bursts out laughing, and says, “You can’t resist it.”

“No more can you,” she says. Then Anne reaches over to place her jewelled hand on his. Maybe it’s seduction, but it looks like game recognizing game.

HBO’s “The Casual Vacancy” is another British-made literary adaptation about sexual hypocrisy and class snobbery, this one set in a modern English village called Pagford. Based on J. K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, it opens with the sudden death of a progressive councilman, Barry Fairbrother, who advocates for social services, like a methadone clinic. Before Barry has even been buried, his seat becomes the focus of competition among three local candidates: a gormless rich boy, an even more gormless school administrator, and a malevolent bully who is nothing but gorm. The town may be picturesque, with its cobblestones and its ancient abbey, but it’s full of Babbitts and vipers, junkies and yuppies, and, in Rowling’s biting portrait, there’s no way to escape the small-town claustrophobia. Once the town’s teens begin to post their parents’ secrets online, the repercussions are dire, even without the option of beheadings.

Sarah Phelps’s screenplay performs major surgery, not just in plot but in tone: it excises the saddest bits of Rowling’s book, making it about thirty-five per cent less tragic. Phelps also trims characters, turns strangers into family members, and simplifies the plot, which in the book deals with the rather abstruse question of whether to rezone a poor community adjacent to Pagford. In the TV show, a pair of venal richies (Michael Gambon and Julia McKenzie, having a blast) scheme to turn a quietly useful community center into a lucrative destination spa. The result is a warmer story, streaked with satire rather than marinated in it. Perhaps the greatest contribution comes from the performance of someone who barely appears: Rory Kinnear (best known as the Prime Minister in the pig episode of “Black Mirror”), whose Barry is a poignant, meaningful figure, a do-gooder whose loss is real for the town’s most vulnerable residents.

Also excellent is Abigail Lawrie, as Krystal, the Anne Boleyn of Pagford. In her first scene, Lawrie, in short shorts, eyes flashing, struts into a large room full of mocking schoolmates, upending her audience with bravado. To the town elders, Krystal is merely the skank daughter of a junkie. She seduces sons; she sinks property values. But, in the course of three episodes, we begin to see the world through her eyes, and this change, rather than making the story treacly, makes it angrier, earning any agitprop. We’re living in an age of political dramas, many of which celebrate the dream of lifting the scepter, the thrill of a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. There’s something refreshing about this story’s furious smallness, which treats an addict’s need for food and transportation with the seriousness of some regal jock’s Italian divorce. ♦

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Why we haven't reviewed it yet: Haven't gotten our hands on a copy yet Chances that we will review it: Slim -- like her work, and the reviews make it sound tempting, but it's still a heap of historical fiction - Return to top of the page -

   Review Consensus :   Very positive -- and see it as a possible breakout book for her    From the Reviews : " Wolf Hall is a fantastically well-wrought, detailed and convincing novel (....) There is so much to praise in Wolf Hall (.....) Despite its length, the pace is fast. A couple of hundred pages in, you feel as if you might drown in its volume. But you emerge at the end dazed and moved, properly infected by the period. It both is and isn�t an easy read. (...) But where Mantel really excels is in the small, dark stuff." - Julie Myerson, Financial Times "In Wolf Hall , Mantel persuasively depicts this beefy pen-pusher and backstairs manoeuvrer as one of the most appealing -- and, in his own way, enlightened -- characters of the period. (...) How do you write about Henry VIII without being camp or breathless or making him do something clunkily non-stereotypical ? Mantel attacks the problem from several angles, starting by knowing a lot about the period but not drawing attention to how strenuously she's imagining it. Meaty dialogue takes precedence over description, and the present-tense narration is so closely tied to the main character that Cromwell is usually called plain "he", even when it causes ambiguities. Above all, Mantel avoids ye olde-style diction, preferring more contemporary phrasing. (...) Lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it's not like much else in contemporary British fiction." - Christopher Tayler, The Guardian "Mantel's writing is taut; the dialogue sprints along, witty and convincing. She draws her extensive cast with deft strokes." - Marianne Brace, The Independent "Mantel�s chief method is to pick out tableaux vivants from the historical record -- which she has worked over with great care -- and then to suggest that they have an inward aspect which is completely unlike the version presented in history books. The result is less a historical novel than an alternative history novel. It constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew. (...) Mantel�s ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional." - Colin Burrow, London Review of Books "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 Tudor England." - Ross King, The Los Angeles Times "In the hands of Hilary Mantel, Tudor kitsch becomes something darker and less digestible. Wolf Hall takes a forensic slice through a nation caught between feudalism and capitalism, the Middle Ages and modernity, Catholicism and the revolutionary doctrines emerging from the Continent. (...) Mantel�s prose, like her hero, is witty and tough-minded." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman "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 "This witty, densely populated book may experience a rough passage when it crosses the Atlantic. For readers not fully versed in the nuances of England�s tangled royal bloodlines, not amused by Ms. Mantel�s deliberate obliqueness (...) or not even familiar with the effect of the law of praemunire on the papacy, Wolf Hall has its share of stumbling blocks. (...) But her book�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." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times "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. (...) Hilary Mantel�s Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable." - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review "Mantel�s characters do not speak sixteenth-century English. She has created for them an idiom that combines a certain archaism with vigorous modern English. It works perfectly. And how urbane her people are! (...) The prose is elastic. Sometimes it�s elliptical. (...) Elsewhere it is full, or overfull." - Joan Acocella, The New Yorker "Plot summary, for a 560-page novel that offers at its outset two charts of family trees and five pages of character names, proves a bit impractical. (...) Dialogue sings and crackles, in language that is at once lyrical, decorous and slangily modern (.....) His brilliant company, and the life-size pageant of his world, give such sustained pleasure that we are greedy for particulars of a story whose outcome, in theory, we already know." - Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle "Mantel's triumph is to take a figure associated with ambition, scheming and avarice and transform him into a sympathetic, humane and supremely modern man. (...) Mantel's approach is oblique and ingenious. (...) Wolf Hall manages to unite her interests thus far. It is a novel about power, both political and supernatural, in which Cromwell manipulates the invisible web of profit just as disgruntled priests conjure up expedient prophets. Accountancy and astrology vie with each other." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday "With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell (.....) She creates immediacy by using the present tense, and a sense of intimacy with the characters through dialogue. She gives their language period touches, but never falls into pastiche. The pieces of the jigsaw may be familiar, but she shuffles them around so that the full picture emerges only gradually, in bright fragments." - Anne Chisholm, The Spectator "(A) vibrant, often compelling mix of the personal and the political (.....) Cromwell is an arrestingly complex figure in Mantel�s retelling. (...) The book has many other alluring qualities. Mantel�s characterisation is acute (...) Above all, Mantel�s recreation of the era feels both accurate and natural. By focusing, not on the famous set-pieces, but on the human interaction taking place around them, she makes the reader complicit in the drama. (...) The effect, sadly, is to turn a potentially outstanding novel into merely a commendable one." - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times "This is a splendidly ambitious book, ample enough to hold a crowd of people and to encompass historical events across all of Europe (the sack of Rome is described in one vivid paragraph) and hint at at least another novel�s worth of themes." - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Telegraph "In lesser hands Cromwell�s modern sympathies -- believing in nurture over nature, loving over burning, learning over prayer -- might make for a lifeless and anachronistic portrait. But the devil is in the language and Mantel animates the familiar story with great imagination. (...) Mantel knows how to build a picture from the parts available, with nothing extraneous and everything layered." - Claudia FitzHerbert, The Telegraph "But as soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle -- one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too." - Vanora Bennett, The Times "Unusually for a novel 650 pages long, Wolf Hall is written in the present tense, which enhances its feverishness. This lends both people and their possessions a dramatic clarity, a presence, which an informed, retrospective viewpoint, left almost entirely to the reader�s imagination, might have marred. We are not looking back at a path through time, but trying to find our way onward, and uncertainty reigns. (...) In this way, the novel becomes a play, becomes a gallery, conscious of its own framing devices, and is all the richer for being a historiographical as well as a historical novel." - Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement "Ms. Mantel has a knack for getting under the skin of her characters and capturing them (one feels) as they must have been" - Martin Rubin, Wall Street Journal "(F)rom 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 advisor, Thomas Cromwell. (...) Wolf Hall is uncompromising and unsentimental, though alert readers will detect an underlying strain of gruff tenderness. Similarly, Mantel's prose is as plain as her protagonist (who's sensitive about his looks), but also (like Cromwell) extraordinarily flexible, subtle and shrewd." - Wendy Smith, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

Notes about the Reviews and the Book's Reception :

About the Author :

       English author Hilary Mantel was born in 1952. Author of several highly praised novels, she won the Hawthornden Prize in 1996.

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Wolf Hall Trilogy

Hilary Mantel, Simon Vance, Simon Slater

About this Series

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy is the magnificent, riveting historical saga of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, featuring Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Jane Seymour, and other political and royal players from Tudor England.

Man Booker Prize-winning novels among other honors, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies also served as the basis for the six-part BBC and PBS Masterpiece television series starring Academy Award-winner Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and The Crown ’s Emmy Award-winner Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, as well as being adapted into award-winning and critically-acclaimed stage plays in London’s West End and on Broadway.

“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 falcon-like…both spellbinding and believable.”— The New York Times Book Review

The Mirror & the Light

By Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies: The Conclusion to PBS Masterpiece's Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel; Read by Simon VanceHilary Mantel; Read by Simon Vance

Wolf Hall: As Seen on PBS Masterpiece

Books in this series.

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies PBS Masterpiece E-Book Bundle

By Hilary Mantel, read by Simon SlaterHilary Mantel, read by Simon Slater

About the Author

The Wolf Hall Picture Book

Hilary mantel , ben miles , george miles.

128 pages, Hardcover

Published January 10, 2023

About the author

Hilary Mantel

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4 New Horror Books to Read, Including Stephen King’s Latest Collection

Our columnist reviews May’s most chilling releases.

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By Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic and professor. He is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson award-winning author of “The Devil Takes You Home.”

YOU LIKE IT DARKER: Stories (Scribner, 502 pp., $30) is an outstanding collection from Stephen King, the master of horror, that features 12 eerie tales full of darkness, loss, danger, resilience and even aliens.

There are no throwaways here, but some stories merit individual attention. The first story,“Two Talented Bastids,” opens the book brilliantly. It’s a tale about an aging author and an old friend who was a famous painter that begins normally enough and then delves into the dark secret of how both creatives got their skills. Its gradual slide into terror perfectly sets the tone for the entire collection. “The Fifth Step,” about a man who opens up to a stranger in a park, is a literary shanking — it’s fast and violent in equal measure. “On Slide Inn Road,” about a family that encounters two murderers while stuck on a country road, is a master class in tension and is full of King’s dark humor. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” the crown jewel of the collection, is a 150-page crime novella about a man dealing with the aftermath of a strange dream and the obsessed detective with arithmomania hellbent on pinning a crime on him.

This book will please any horror reader, but loyal King fans will find these stories particularly rewarding, especially because of the callbacks to his previous works.

“You like it darker? Fine. So do I,” King states in his afterword. He knows what we like, and he delivers. This collection proves King is still king.

Layla Martínez’s debut novel, WOODWORM (Two Lines Press, 149 pp., $21.95), is a wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy novel about women trapped in a haunted house where shadows devour people.

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