Book review: Wolf Hall

(Published in the Business Standard, October 14, 2009)

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate
POUNDS 7.99, 653 pages

On June 30, 1540, a blacksmith’s son risen to power wrote in desperation to his king, Henry VIII of England: “I crye for mercye, mercye, mercye.” A month later, as Henry hastened to marry Catherine Howard, the fourth of his six wives, Thomas Cromwell, once chief minister and the most powerful man in the land, was executed. In a gruesome touch, Cromwell’s head was boiled and set on a spike in the Tower of London; and an inexpert butcher swung the axe for the blacksmith’s son.

This part of Thomas Cromwell’s tale is not told in Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning, acute, Wolf Hall, set in the turbulent court of Henry VIII. Historical novels don’t need to set down the ending, since we know that part of the story already. Anne Boleyn with her catlike-yawn and beguiling tempestuousness will be beheaded; Henry VIII chose an executioner with a sharp sword, for he loved her so much he wished her to suffer little pain. Jane Seymour will be—briefly—the next Queen of England. And Cromwell, having risen further and faster than most men of his time could dream of, will be killed by his king.

What interests Mantel, one of the most ambitious and technically brilliant novelists of the day, is larger than the story, however fascinating, of long-dead kings, queens and courtiers. Wolf Hall is a study in power, acquisition and lust—always fine themes for those interested in self-improvement—with Cromwell as an alpha among the pack. “The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.”

Cromwell’s father may have been an innkeeper or a blacksmith; Mantel chooses blacksmith for the purposes of this novel. Our first glimpse of the young Thomas is of a boy “felled, dazed, silent”, thrashed by Walter Cromwell, a commonplace occurrence in the Cromwell family. From this passage of physical violence, it’s an easy movement to the more sophisticated violence of the court, as young Cromwell climbs higher and higher. Mantel’s character list runs to five pages, and yet we feel we know them all, their entrances and exits are so well-managed.

This is familiar ground for a historical novel, but Mantel raises Wolf Hall well above the level of her competitors. If Anya Seton offered blood, guts and romance in the melodramatic Katherine and Philippa Gregory took a sideways look at the price of ambition in The Other Boleyn Girl, Mantel’s subject is the remorselessness pace of history.

Cardinal Wolsey appears by page 18, a man at the peak of his powers, a successful summitteer on the slopes of ambition, easy in his skin “like a leopard settling into a warm spot”. Less than forty pages later, Wolsey is deposed, his riches scattered, humbled enough to cry as an impassive Cromwell looks on, learning the lessons of power, and the loss of it. Over the next six hundred pages, Anne Boleyn’s ambition and control over the king will flash into vivid life. Mantel exercises supreme control over her material, letting the reader know what lies ahead with brutal clarity rather than appealing to our sense of pathos.

Here is Anne, three hundred pages before she rests her slender neck on the chopping block, contemptuously holding up a piece of paper found in the bed where she makes just enough love to Henry to drive the king insane in his quest for more: “The central figure is the king. .. On either side of him is a woman; the one on the left has no head. ‘That’s the queen,’ she says. ‘Katherine. And that’s me.’ She laughs. ‘Anne sans tete.’”

Mantel is unusual among historical novelists for her understanding of the past—which is to say that she understands that for the Tudors, their times were modern, contemporary. The courts of the Tudors, with their rich tapestries; the oaths of the day; the casual brutality with which a crowd will attend the burning of an old woman, a Loller, and then stove her burned skull and bones in with an iron bar for entertainment; all of these are described with the eyes of a traveller of the period, not from the perspective of a novelist looking back at the past.

Wolf Hall itself, the home of Jane Seymour and her family, is never visited, often evoked, but it is just the right brooding, forbidding presence for this book. In her previous work, Mantel has examined history with a merciless clarity—whether it’s through a memoir like Giving Up The Ghost, or through the story of a turn-of-the-millennium medium with her own posse of ghosts in Beyond Black. Wolf Hall shows the same pitiless curiosity, married to Mantel’s vivid imagination. It’s a great place to start for those who haven’t encountered her work. If man is wolf to man, Mantel’s the silent presence recording everything, loping alongside the pack.

The BS Column: The unbearable heaviness of the Nobel

(Published in the Business Standard, 12 October 2009)

Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has been a fierce critic of Ceauşescu's regime in Romania. She is highly regarded in Europe's academic circles. She had received over 20 literary awards, including the IMPAC, before winning the Nobel this year. And I must confess an unliterary complaint: having read only two of her books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, I have about as much enthusiasm for reading her as I do for swimming through a pool of cold porridge.

The Nobel Prize in literature is administered by the Swedish Academy, the process of selection is rigorous, and the shortlist of candidates will usually begin at about 25 names and then be whittled down to roughly five, before a winner is chosen. In a recent interview, Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee, revealed that an author's name will often come up for consideration for several years before a nomination finally finds acceptance. All of this is imbued with gravitas; but none of this explains why the Prize should be taken as seriously as it is, except for the fact of its longevity.

The Prize's track record over the first thirty years of its inception, from 1901 to 1930, was dubious at best, with a smattering of the Yeatses, Kiplings and Shaws making up for a score of now-forgotten writers (Mommsen, Hamsun, Spitteler—names no longer read, even in their home countries). It redeemed itself somewhat between the 1940s and the 1980s, yielding at least a reasonable reading list of authors whose works have endured the passage of time. In the last two decades, the Prize seems determined to make political points and to shine a light on the obscure.

An uncharitable critic might detect the undertow of an anxiety that Europe might be losing its influence, that the great writers who are undiscovered by the British, the Americans (and a handful of Indians) will sink into obscurity, taking part of the history of Europe with them. What else might explain recent awards to Imre Kertesz, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and now Herta Müller? And there's a sense of drift with some other choices: Dario Fo and Doris Lessing, for instance, may have deserved their Nobel nods, but both received the laurel long after their respective works had ceased to exert a once-powerful influence.

It is not that these are writers of no merit: truly bad writers don't make it to the shortlist. In different ways, Le Clezio, Jelinek, Kertesz and Müller have made their contributions to literature and literary history. Consider this, perhaps, evidence of this critic's poor taste and judgement, when I say that reading their works has not convinced me that these are writers who will last, or whose works I am astonished and pleased to discover. Perhaps pleasure is a frivolous thing to want from the Nobel Prize; perhaps its august list of writers is prescriptive, a judgement handed down from a great height to us lesser mortals, an injunction to go forth and have our minds improved. It is frivolous to complain, as I do having read two of Müller's books and all that is available of Le Clezio, Jelinek and Kertesz in translation, that they bring me no enjoyment as a reader. And yet I find that enjoyment is important to me, personally, as a reader, and that in the last two decades, I have had little of that from the Nobel.


The Nobel in literature has now been awarded for over a century; the Man Booker International has made just three awards since 2005. The Nobel is administered by the venerable academicians of the Swedish Academy, a committee that rarely changes the composition of its members. The Man Booker International has a shifting list of judges, chosen from among contemporary writers every award season: it is peer-driven, with all the benefits and faults this entails. The first of its three awards went to Ismail Kadare, whose works found a new and newly loyal readership; the second to Chinua Achebe, opening up his work to readers who were beginning to forget him, and the culture he came from; and the third to Alice Munro, establishing the worth of the short story as a literary genre in its own right.

If the Man Booker continues in this vein, it will outstrip an increasingly insular Nobel literature award in the next decade as the prize to watch. Until we get there, though, I have to locate and find the remaining works of Herta Müller. Perhaps reading her will be a voyage of discovery and wonder, but I suspect this will be more like trying to read the Wodehouse-created authoress so admired by Bertie Wooster, Lady Florence Craye, author of Spindrift. That book, says Wooster, went down “like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads round Bloomsbury way”, but he, like this critic, had a plebeian soul and remained unmoved by her craft.